Dutch painter, part of a family of painters. By the age of 12 he was apprenticed to Johannes Stroebel (1821-1905), and from 1850 he attended classes at the Academie in The Hague. In 1854 he accompanied his teacher, Huib van Hove (1814-1864), to Antwerp, where he attended evening classes at the Academie for two years and made contact with Louis Meijer (1809-1866), the marine painter. In 1855 he was joined in Antwerp by his brother Matthijs Maris, with whom he shared a workshop and house. For a short period their friend and fellow student Laurens Alma-Tadema came to live with them. They lived on Matthijs's grant and made small paintings, based on 17th-century Dutch genre pictures, for the American market. From 1865 he was in Paris as a pupil of Ernest Hébert (1817-1908) and was influenced by the Barbizon School. He exhibited at the Salon from 1866. From 1870 he lived in The Hague, painting Dutch landscapes with loose brushworks. //