PAINTERS from Netherlands

Top 10

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the top 10 most legendary Dutch Painters of all time. This list of famous Dutch Painters is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity. Visit the rankings page to view the entire list of Dutch Painters.

1. Vincent van Gogh (1853 - 1890)

With an HPI of 91.06, Vincent van Gogh is the most famous Dutch Painter.  His biography has been translated into 206 different languages on wikipedia.

Vincent Willem van Gogh (Dutch: [ˈvɪnsɛnt ˈʋɪləɱ‿vɑŋ‿ˈɣɔx] ; 30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade, he created approximately 2100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life. His oeuvre includes landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and self-portraits, most of which are characterized by bold colors and dramatic brushwork that contributed to the rise of expressionism in modern art. Van Gogh's work was beginning to gain critical attention before he died from a self-inflicted gunshot at age 37. During his lifetime, only one of Van Gogh's paintings, The Red Vineyard, was sold. Born into an upper-middle-class family, Van Gogh drew as a child and was serious, quiet and thoughtful, but showed signs of mental instability. As a young man, he worked as an art dealer, often travelling, but became depressed after he was transferred to London. He turned to religion and spent time as a missionary in southern Belgium. Later he drifted into ill-health and solitude. He was keenly aware of modernist trends in art and, while back with his parents, took up painting in 1881. His younger brother, Theo, supported him financially, and the two of them maintained a long correspondence. Van Gogh's early works consist of mostly still lifes and depictions of peasant laborers. In 1886, he moved to Paris, where he met members of the artistic avant-garde, including Émile Bernard and Paul Gauguin, who were seeking new paths beyond Impressionism. Frustrated in Paris and inspired by a growing spirit of artistic change and collaboration, in February 1888, Van Gogh moved to Arles in southern France to establish an artistic retreat and commune. Once there, Van Gogh's art changed. His paintings grew brighter and he turned his attention to the natural world, depicting local olive groves, wheat fields and sunflowers. Van Gogh invited Gauguin to join him in Arles and eagerly anticipated Gauguin's arrival in the fall of 1888. Van Gogh suffered from psychotic episodes and delusions. Though he worried about his mental stability, he often neglected his physical health, did not eat properly and drank heavily. His friendship with Gauguin ended after a confrontation with a razor when, in a rage, he severed his left ear. Van Gogh spent time in psychiatric hospitals, including a period at Saint-Rémy. After he discharged himself and moved to the Auberge Ravoux in Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris, he came under the care of the homeopathic doctor Paul Gachet. His depression persisted, and on 27 July 1890, Van Gogh is believed to have shot himself in the chest with a revolver, dying from his injuries two days later. Van Gogh's work began to attract critical artistic attention in the last year of his life. After his death, Van Gogh's art and life story captured public imagination as an emblem of misunderstood genius, due in large part to the efforts of his widowed sister-in-law Johanna van Gogh-Bonger. His bold use of color, expressive line and thick application of paint inspired avant-garde artistic groups like the Fauves and German Expressionists in the early 20th century. Van Gogh's work gained widespread critical and commercial success in the following decades, and he has become a lasting icon of the romantic ideal of the tortured artist. Today, Van Gogh's works are among the world's most expensive paintings ever sold. His legacy is honored and celebrated by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which holds the world's largest collection of his paintings and drawings.

2. Rembrandt (1606 - 1669)

With an HPI of 87.68, Rembrandt is the 2nd most famous Dutch Painter.  His biography has been translated into 169 different languages.

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (, Dutch: [ˈrɛmbrɑnt ˈɦɑrmə(n)ˌsoːɱ vɑn ˈrɛin] ; 15 July 1606 – 4 October 1669), usually simply known as Rembrandt, was a Dutch Golden Age painter, printmaker, and draughtsman. He is generally considered one of the greatest visual artists in the history of art. It is estimated Rembrandt produced a total of about three hundred paintings, three hundred etchings, and two thousand drawings. Unlike most Dutch painters of the 17th century, Rembrandt's works depict a wide range of styles and subject matter, from portraits and self-portraits to landscapes, genre scenes, allegorical and historical scenes, biblical and mythological themes and animal studies. His contributions to art came in a period that historians call the Dutch Golden Age. Rembrandt never went abroad but was considerably influenced by the work of the Italian Old Masters and Dutch and Flemish artists who had studied in Italy. After he achieved youthful success as a portrait painter, Rembrandt's later years were marked by personal tragedy and financial hardships. Yet his etchings and paintings were popular throughout his lifetime, his reputation as an artist remained high, and for twenty years he taught many important Dutch painters. Rembrandt's portraits of his contemporaries, self-portraits and illustrations of scenes from the Bible are regarded as his greatest creative triumphs. His approximately 40 self-portraits form an intimate autobiography.

3. Johannes Vermeer (1632 - 1675)

With an HPI of 83.20, Johannes Vermeer is the 3rd most famous Dutch Painter.  His biography has been translated into 106 different languages.

Johannes Vermeer (, Dutch: [vərˈmeːr], see below; also known as Jan Vermeer; October 1632 – 15 December 1675) was a Dutch painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of middle-class life. He is considered one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age. During his lifetime, he was a moderately successful provincial genre painter, recognized in Delft and The Hague. He produced relatively few paintings, primarily earning his living as an art dealer. He was not wealthy; at his death, his wife was left in debt. Vermeer worked slowly and with great care, and frequently used very expensive pigments. He is particularly renowned for making masterful use of light in his work. "Almost all his paintings", Hans Koningsberger wrote, "are apparently set in two smallish rooms in his house in Delft; they show the same furniture and decorations in various arrangements and they often portray the same people, mostly women." The modest celebrity he enjoyed during his life gave way to obscurity after his death. He was barely mentioned in Arnold Houbraken's major source book on 17th-century Dutch painting (Grand Theatre of Dutch Painters and Women Artists, published 1718) and, as a result, was omitted from subsequent surveys of Dutch art for nearly two centuries. In the 19th century, Vermeer was rediscovered by Gustav Friedrich Waagen and Théophile Thoré-Bürger, who published an essay attributing 66 pictures to him, although only 34 paintings are universally attributed to him today. Since that time, Vermeer's reputation has grown enormously.

4. Piet Mondrian (1872 - 1944)

With an HPI of 81.10, Piet Mondrian is the 4th most famous Dutch Painter.  His biography has been translated into 72 different languages.

Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan (Dutch: [ˈpi:tər kɔrˈneːlɪs ˈmɔndrijaːn]), after 1906 known as Piet Mondrian (, also US: , Dutch: [pit ˈmɔndrijɑn]; 7 March 1872 – 1 February 1944), was a Dutch painter and art theoretician who is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He is known for being one of the pioneers of 20th-century abstract art, as he changed his artistic direction from figurative painting to an increasingly abstract style, until he reached a point where his artistic vocabulary was reduced to simple geometric elements. Mondrian's art was highly utopian and was concerned with a search for universal values and aesthetics. He proclaimed in 1914: "Art is higher than reality and has no direct relation to reality. To approach the spiritual in art, one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual. We find ourselves in the presence of an abstract art. Art should be above reality, otherwise it would have no value for man." He was a contributor to the De Stijl art movement and group, which he co-founded with Theo van Doesburg. He evolved a non-representational form which he termed Neoplasticism. This was the new 'pure plastic art' which he believed was necessary in order to create 'universal beauty'. To express this, Mondrian eventually decided to limit his formal vocabulary to the three primary colors (red, blue, and yellow), the three primary values (black, white, and gray), and the two primary directions (horizontal and vertical). Mondrian's arrival in Paris from the Netherlands in 1911 marked the beginning of a period of profound change. He encountered experiments in Cubism and with the intent of integrating himself within the Parisian avant-garde removed an 'a' from the Dutch spelling of his name (Mondriaan). Mondrian's work had an enormous influence on 20th-century art, influencing not only the course of abstract painting and numerous major styles and art movements (e.g. Color Field painting, Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism), but also fields outside the domain of painting, such as design, architecture and fashion. Design historian Stephen Bayley said: "Mondrian has come to mean Modernism. His name and his work sum up the High Modernist ideal. I don't like the word 'iconic', so let's say that he's become totemic – a totem for everything Modernism set out to be." Mondrian was born in Amersfoort, province of Utrecht in the Netherlands, the second of his parents' children. He was descended from Christian Dirkzoon Monderyan who lived in The Hague as early as 1670. The family moved to Winterswijk when his father, Pieter Cornelius Mondriaan, was appointed head teacher at a local primary school. Mondrian was introduced to art from an early age. His father was a qualified drawing teacher, and, with his uncle, Frits Mondriaan (a pupil of Willem Maris of the Hague School of artists), the younger Piet often painted and drew along the river Gein. After a strict Protestant upbringing, in 1892, Mondrian entered the Academy for Fine Art in Amsterdam. He was already qualified as a teacher. He began his career as a teacher in primary education, but he also practiced painting. Most of his work from this period is naturalistic or Impressionistic, consisting largely of landscapes. These pastoral images of his native country depict windmills, fields, and rivers, initially in the Dutch Impressionist manner of the Hague School and then in a variety of styles and techniques that attest to his search for a personal style. These paintings are representational, and they illustrate the influence that various artistic movements had on Mondrian, including pointillism and the vivid colors of Fauvism. In 1893 he had his first exhibition. On display in the Kunstmuseum Den Haag are a number of paintings from this period, including such Post-Impressionist works as The Red Mill and Trees in Moonrise. Another painting, Evening (Avond) (1908), depicting a tree in a field at dusk, even augurs future developments by using a palette consisting almost entirely of red, yellow, and blue. Although Avond is only limitedly abstract, it is the earliest Mondrian painting to emphasize primary colors. Mondrian's earliest paintings showing a degree of abstraction are a series of canvases from 1905 to 1908 that depict dim scenes of indistinct trees and houses reflected in still water. Although the result leads the viewer to begin focusing on the forms over the content, these paintings are still firmly rooted in nature, and it is only the knowledge of Mondrian's later achievements that leads one to search in these works for the roots of his future abstraction. Mondrian's art was intimately related to his spiritual and philosophical studies. In 1908, he became interested in the theosophical movement launched by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in the late 19th century, and in 1909 he joined the Dutch branch of the Theosophical Society. The work of Blavatsky and a parallel spiritual movement, Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy, significantly affected the further development of his aesthetic. Blavatsky believed that it was possible to attain a more profound knowledge of nature than that provided by empirical means, and much of Mondrian's work for the rest of his life was inspired by his search for that spiritual knowledge. In 1918, he wrote "I got everything from the Secret Doctrine", referring to a book written by Blavatsky. In 1921, in a letter to Steiner, Mondrian argued that his neoplasticism was "the art of the foreseeable future for all true Anthroposophists and Theosophists". He remained a committed Theosophist in subsequent years, although he also believed that his own artistic current, neoplasticism, would eventually become part of a larger, ecumenical spirituality. Mondrian and his later work were deeply influenced by the 1911 Moderne Kunstkring exhibition of Cubism in Amsterdam. His search for simplification is shown in two versions of Still Life with Ginger Pot (Stilleven met Gemberpot). The 1911 version, is Cubist; in the 1912 version, the objects are reduced to a round shape with triangles and rectangles. In 1911, Mondrian moved to Paris and changed his name, dropping an "a" from "Mondriaan", to emphasize his departure from the Netherlands, and his integration within the Parisian avant-garde. While in Paris, the influence of the Cubist style of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque appeared almost immediately in Mondrian's work. Paintings such as The Sea (1912) and his various studies of trees from that year still contain a measure of representation, but, increasingly, they are dominated by geometric shapes and interlocking planes. While Mondrian was eager to absorb the Cubist influence into his work, it seems clear that he saw Cubism as a "port of call" on his artistic journey, rather than as a destination. Piet Mondrian's Cubist period lasted from 1912 to 1917. Unlike the Cubists, Mondrian still attempted to reconcile his painting with his spiritual pursuits, and in 1913 he began to fuse his art and his theosophical studies into a theory that signaled his final break from representational painting. While Mondrian was visiting the Netherlands in 1914, World War I began, forcing him to remain there for the duration of the conflict. During this period, he stayed at the Laren artists' colony, where he met Bart van der Leck and Theo van Doesburg, who were both undergoing their own personal journeys toward abstraction. Van der Leck's use of only primary colors in his art greatly influenced Mondrian. After a meeting with Van der Leck in 1916, Mondrian wrote, "My technique which was more or less Cubist, and therefore more or less pictorial, came under the influence of his precise method." With Van Doesburg, Mondrian founded De Stijl (The Style), a journal of the De Stijl Group, in which he first published essays defining his theory, which he called neoplasticism. Mondrian published "De Nieuwe Beelding in de schilderkunst" ("The New Visualisation in Painting"), in twelve installments during 1917 and 1918. This was his first major attempt to express his artistic theory in writing. Mondrian's best and most-often quoted expression of this theory, however, comes from a letter he wrote to H. P. Bremmer in 1914: I construct lines and color combinations on a flat surface, in order to express general beauty with the utmost awareness. Nature (or, that which I see) inspires me, puts me, as with any painter, in an emotional state so that an urge comes about to make something, but I want to come as close as possible to the truth and abstract everything from that, until I reach the foundation (still just an external foundation!) of things… I believe it is possible that, through horizontal and vertical lines constructed with awareness, but not with calculation, led by high intuition, and brought to harmony and rhythm, these basic forms of beauty, supplemented if necessary by other direct lines or curves, can become a work of art, as strong as it is true.Over the next two decades, Mondrian methodically developed his signature style embracing the Classical, Platonic, Euclidean worldview where he simply focused on his, now iconic, horizontal and vertical black lines forming squares and rectangles filled with primary hues. When World War I ended in 1918, Mondrian returned to France, where he would remain until 1938. Immersed in post-war Paris culture of artistic innovation, he flourished and fully embraced the art of pure abstraction for the rest of his life. Mondrian began producing grid-based paintings in late 1919, and in 1920, the style for which he came to be renowned began to appear. Mondrian believed that "pure abstract art becomes completely emancipated, free of naturalistic appearances. It is no longer natural harmony but creates equivalent relationships. The realization of equivalent relationships is of the highest importance for life. In the early paintings of this style, the lines delineating the rectangular forms are relatively thin, and they are gray, not black. The lines also tend to fade as they approach the edge of the painting, rather than stopping abruptly. The forms themselves, smaller and more numerous than in later paintings, are filled with primary colors, black, or gray, and nearly all of them are colored; only a few are left white. During late 1920 and 1921, Mondrian's paintings arrive at what is to casual observers their definitive and mature form. Thick black lines now separate the forms, which are larger and fewer in number, and more of the forms are left white. This was not the culmination of his artistic evolution, however. Although the refinements became subtler, Mondrian's work continued to evolve during his years in Paris. In the 1921 paintings, many, though not all, of the black lines stop short at a seemingly arbitrary distance from the edge of the canvas, although the divisions between the rectangular forms remain intact. Here, too, the rectangular forms remain mostly colored. As the years passed and Mondrian's work evolved further, he began extending all of the lines to the edges of the canvas, and he began to use fewer and fewer colored forms, favoring white instead. These tendencies are particularly obvious in the "lozenge" works that Mondrian began producing with regularity in the mid-1920s. The "lozenge" paintings are square canvases tilted 45 degrees, so that they have a diamond shape. Typical of these is Schilderij No. 1: Lozenge With Two Lines and Blue (1926). One of the most minimal of Mondrian's canvases, this painting consists only of two black, perpendicular lines and a small blue triangular form. The lines extend all the way to the edges of the canvas, almost giving the impression that the painting is a fragment of a larger work. Although one's view of the painting is hampered by the glass protecting it, and by the toll that age and handling have obviously taken on the canvas, a close examination of this painting begins to reveal something of the artist's method. The painting is not composed of perfectly flat planes of color, as one might expect. Subtle brush strokes are evident throughout. The artist appears to have used different techniques for the various elements. The black lines are the flattest elements, with the least depth. The colored forms have the most obvious brush strokes, all running in one direction. Most interesting, however, are the white forms, which clearly have been painted in layers, using brush strokes running in different directions. This generates a greater sense of depth in the white forms so that they appear to overwhelm the lines and the colors, which indeed they were doing, as Mondrian's paintings of this period came to be increasingly dominated by white space. In 1926, Katherine Dreier, co-founder of New York City's Society of Independent Artists (along with Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray), visited Piet Mondrian's studio in Paris and acquired one of his diamond compositions, Painting I. This was then shown during an exhibition organized by the Society of Independent Artists in the Brooklyn Museum – the first major exhibition of modern art in America since the Armory Show. She stated in the catalog that "Holland has produced three great painters who, though a logical expression of their own country, rose above it through the vigor of their personality – the first was Rembrandt, the second was Van Gogh, and the third is Mondrian." As the years progressed, lines began to take precedence over forms in Mondrian's paintings. In the 1930s, he began to use thinner lines and double lines more frequently, punctuated with a few small colored forms, if any at all. Double lines particularly excited Mondrian, for he believed they offered his paintings a new dynamism which he was eager to explore. The introduction of the double line in his work was influenced by the work of his friend and contemporary Marlow Moss. From 1934 to 1935, three of Mondrian's paintings were exhibited as part of the "Abstract and Concrete" exhibitions in the UK at Oxford, London, and Liverpool. In September 1938, Mondrian left Paris in the face of advancing fascism and moved to London. After the Netherlands was invaded and Paris fell in 1940, he left London for Manhattan in New York City, where he would remain until his death. Some of Mondrian's later works are difficult to place in terms of his artistic development because there were quite a few canvases that he began in Paris or London and only completed months or years later in Manhattan. The finished works from this later period are visually busy, with more lines than any of his work since the 1920s, placed in an overlapping arrangement that is almost cartographical in appearance. He spent many long hours painting on his own until his hands blistered, and he sometimes cried or made himself sick. Mondrian produced Lozenge Composition With Four Yellow Lines (1933), a simple painting that innovated thick, colored lines instead of black ones. After that one painting, this practice remained dormant in Mondrian's work until he arrived in Manhattan, at which time he began to embrace it with abandon. In some examples of this new direction, such as Composition (1938) / Place de la Concorde (1943), he appears to have taken unfinished black-line paintings from Paris and completed them in New York by adding short perpendicular lines of different colors, running between the longer black lines, or from a black line to the edge of the canvas. The newly colored areas are thick, almost bridging the gap between lines and forms, and it is startling to see color in a Mondrian painting that is unbounded by black. Other works mix long lines of red amidst the familiar black lines, creating a new sense of depth by the addition of a colored layer on top of the black one. His painting Composition No. 10, 1939–1942, characterized by primary colors, white ground and black grid lines clearly defined Mondrian's radical but classical approach to the rectangle. On 23 September 1940 Mondrian left Europe for New York aboard the Cunard White Star Line ship RMS Samaria (1920), departing from Liverpool. The new canvases that Mondrian began in Manhattan are even more startling, and indicate the beginning of a new idiom that was cut short by the artist's death. New York City (1942) is a complex lattice of red, blue, and yellow lines, occasionally interlacing to create a greater sense of depth than his previous works. An unfinished 1941 version of this work, titled New York City I, uses strips of painted paper tape, which the artist could rearrange at will to experiment with different designs. In October 2022 it was revealed that the work, which was first displayed at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 1945, had been displayed upside down, since at least 1980, at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Germany, where it is now held. The gallery explained that it would continue to display it the wrong way up to avoid damaging it. His painting Broadway Boogie-Woogie (1942–43) at the Museum of Modern Art was highly influential in the school of abstract geometric painting. The piece is made up of a number of shimmering squares of bright color that leap from the canvas, then appear to shimmer, drawing the viewer into those neon lights. In this painting and the unfinished Victory Boogie Woogie (1942–1944), Mondrian replaced former solid lines with lines created from small adjoining rectangles of color, created in part by using small pieces of paper tape in various colors. Larger unbounded rectangles of color punctuate the design, some with smaller concentric rectangles inside them. While Mondrian's works of the 1920s and 1930s tend to have an almost scientific austerity about them, these are bright, lively paintings, reflecting the upbeat music that inspired them and the city in which they were made. In these final works, the forms have indeed usurped the role of the lines, opening another new door for Mondrian's development as an abstractionist. The Boogie-Woogie paintings were clearly more of a revolutionary change than an evolutionary one, representing the most profound development in Mondrian's work since his abandonment of representational art in 1913. In 2008 the Dutch television program Andere Tijden found the only known movie footage with Mondrian. The discovery of the film footage was announced at the end of a two-year research program on the Victory Boogie Woogie. The research found that the painting was in very good condition and that Mondrian painted the composition in one session. It also was found that the composition was changed radically by Mondrian shortly before his death by using small pieces of colored tape. When the 47-year-old Piet Mondrian left the Netherlands for unfettered Paris for the second and last time in 1919, he set about at once to make his studio a nurturing environment for paintings he had in mind that would increasingly express the principles of neoplasticism about which he had been writing for two years. To hide the studio's structural flaws quickly and inexpensively, he tacked up large rectangular placards, each in a single color or neutral hue. Smaller colored paper squares and rectangles, composed together, accented the walls. Then came an intense period of painting. Again he addressed the walls, repositioning the colored cutouts, adding to their number, altering the dynamics of color and space, producing new tensions and equilibrium. Before long, he had established a creative schedule in which a period of painting took turns with a period of experimentally regrouping the smaller papers on the walls, a process that directly fed the next period of painting. It was a pattern he followed for the rest of his life, through wartime moves from Paris to London's Hampstead in 1938 and 1940, across the Atlantic to Manhattan. At the age of 71 in the fall of 1943, Mondrian moved into his second and final Manhattan studio at 15 East 59th Street, and set about to recreate the environment he had learned over the years was most congenial to his modest way of life and most stimulating to his art. He painted the high walls the same off-white he used on his easel and on the seats, tables and storage cases he designed and fashioned meticulously from discarded orange and apple-crates. He glossed the top of a white metal stool in the same brilliant primary red he applied to the cardboard sheath he made for the radio-phonograph that spilled forth his beloved jazz from well-traveled records. Visitors to this last studio seldom saw more than one or two new canvases, but found, often to their astonishment, that eight large compositions of colored bits of paper he had tacked and re-tacked to the walls in ever-changing relationships constituted together an environment that, paradoxically and simultaneously, was both kinetic and serene, stimulating and restful. It was the best space, Mondrian said, that he had inhabited. He was there for only a few months, as he died in February 1944. After his death, Mondrian's friend and sponsor in Manhattan, artist Harry Holtzman, and another painter friend, Fritz Glarner, carefully documented the studio on film and in still photographs before opening it to the public for a six-week exhibition. Before dismantling the studio, Holtzman (who was also Mondrian's heir) traced the wall compositions precisely, prepared exact portable facsimiles of the space each had occupied, and affixed to each the original surviving cut-out components. These portable Mondrian compositions have become known as "The Wall Works". Since Mondrian's death, they have been exhibited twice at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art (1983 and 1995–96), once in SoHo at the Carpenter + Hochman Gallery (1984), once each at the Galerie Tokoro in Tokyo, Japan (1993), the XXII Biennial of Sao Paulo (1994), the University of Michigan (1995), and – the first time shown in Europe – at the Akademie der Künste (Academy of The Arts), in Berlin (22 February – 22 April 2007). His work was also shown in a retrospective exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, which ran from August – September 1955. While Mondrian's theories of abstraction have been his enduring legacy, he was also a painter of flowers. He began to paint flowers at the turn of the century, creating portraits of individual blooms that blended his strict artistic training and powers of observation to his spiritual and romantic yearnings. Mondrian continued to paint flowers in a secretive manner into the 1920s, claiming to friends that he did so for commercial reasons alone. The flower paintings were created under the taboo that was cast upon traditional genre and representational painting by an entire age swept up by the triumph of abstraction. Nevertheless, the Mondrian flowers contribute to a broader view of the life and work of Mondrian – a view that diverges sharply from the traditional reading of his artistic evolution. Piet Mondrian died of pneumonia on 1 February 1944 and was interred at the Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. On 3 February 1944 a memorial was held for Mondrian at the Universal Chapel on Lexington Avenue and 52nd Street in Manhattan. The service was attended by nearly 200 people including Alexander Archipenko, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Alexander Calder and Robert Motherwell. The Mondrian / Holtzman Trust functions as Mondrian's official estate, and "aims to promote awareness of Mondrian's artwork and to ensure the integrity of his work". Mondrian was described by critic Robert Hughes, in his 1980 book The Shock of the New, as "one of the supreme artists of the 20th century." Likewise in his television documentaries of The Shock of the New, Hughes referred to Mondrian considered again as "one of the greatest artists of the 20th century (...) who was one of the last painters who believed that the conditions of human life could be changed by making pictures". Dutch art historian Carel Blotkamp, an authority on De Stijl, reaffirmed the same belief that he was "one of the great artists of the twentieth century". In 2022 design historian Stephen Bayley wrote: "Mondrian has come to mean Modernism. His name and his work sum up the High Modernist ideal. I don't like the word 'iconic', so let's say that he's become totemic – a totem for everything Modernism set out to be." On 14 November 2022, Mondrian's Composition No. II was sold at Sotheby's Auction for US $51 million, which beat a previous record of US $50.6 million for his work. Composition No. II features a 20-inch by 20-inch canvas with a large red square in the upper right corner, a small blue square in the bottom left corner, and a yellow block with all outlined by black. In October 2020, Mondrian's heirs filed a lawsuit in a U.S. court against the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld, Germany, for the return of four paintings by Mondrian. In December 2021, Mondrian's heirs sued the Philadelphia Museum of Art for the return of Mondrian's Composition with Blue (1928) which had been seized by the Nazis, and passed through the art dealers Karl Buchholz and Curt Valentin before being gifted to the museum by Albert E. Gallatin. The National Museum of Serbia was the first museum to include one of Mondrian's paintings in its permanent exhibition. Along with Klee and Kandinsky, Mondrian was one of the main inspirations to the early pointillist musical aesthetic of serialist composer Pierre Boulez, although his interest in Mondrian was restricted to the works of 1914–15. By May 1949 Boulez said he was "suspicious of Mondrian", and by December 1951 expressed a dislike for his paintings (regarding them as "the most denuded of mystery that have ever been in the world"), and a strong preference for Klee. In the 1930s, the French fashion designer Lola Prusac, who worked at that time for Hermès in Paris, designed a range of luggage and bags inspired by the latest works of Mondrian: inlays of red, blue, and yellow leather squares. Fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent's Fall 1965 Mondrian collection featured shift dresses in blocks of primary color with black bordering, inspired by Mondrian. The collection proved so popular that it inspired a range of imitations that encompassed garments from coats to boots. The 1970–1974 American television serial The Partridge Family featured a musical family who purchase an (already-old at the time) 1957 Chevrolet Superior Coach Series 6800 school bus for use as their tour bus, and then repaint it in a colored geometric pattern heavily inspired by Mondrian's grid-based paintings. The reason for this choice of pattern is never discussed in the TV series. The La Vie Claire cycling team's bicycles and clothing designs were inspired by Mondrian's work throughout the 1980s. The French ski and bicycle equipment manufacturer Look, which also sponsored the team, used a Mondrian-inspired logo for a while. The style was revived in 2008 for a limited edition frame. 1980s R&B group Force MDs created a music video for their hit "Love is a House", superimposing themselves performing inside of digitally drawn squares inspired by Composition II. Piet is an esoteric programming language named after Piet Mondrian in which programs look like abstract art. Mondrian is a software for interactive data visualization named after him. Mondrian is a functional scripting language designed by Microsoft Research for the .NET platform. Mondrian is a web-based code review system written in Python and used within Google. Mondrian is an open source OLAP (online analytical processing) server written in Java. Mondrian is an extension of the Conformal Prediction machine learning framework. An episode of the BBC TV drama Hustle entitled "Picture Perfect" is about the team attempting to create and sell a Mondrian forgery. To do so, they must steal a real Mondrian (Composition with Red, Yellow, Blue, and Black, 1921) from an art gallery. In 2001–2003 British artist Keith Milow made a series of paintings based on the so-called Transatlantic Paintings (1935–1940) by Mondrian. The Mondrian is a 20-story high-rise in the Cityplace neighborhood of Oak Lawn, Dallas, Texas, US. Construction started on the structure in 2003 and the building was completed in 2005. In 2008, Nike released a pair of Dunk Low SB shoes inspired by Mondrian's neo-plastic paintings. The front cover to Australian rock band Silverchair's fifth and final album Young Modern (2007) is a tribute to Piet Mondrian's Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow. The cover art of American psychedelic pop indie rock band The Apples in Stereo's second album, Tone Soul Evolution (1997), was inspired by Piet Mondrian. The mathematics book An Introduction to Sparse Stochastic Processes by M. Unser and P. Tafti uses a representation of a stochastic process called the Mondrian process for its cover, which is named because of its resemblance to Piet Mondrian artworks. The Hague City Council honored Mondrian by adorning walls of City Hall with reproductions of his works and describing it as "the largest Mondrian painting in the world." The event celebrated the 100th year of the Stijl movement which Mondrian helped to found. The Jersey Surf Drum & Bugle Corps performed a show based on Piet Mondrian in their 2018 production titled [mondo mondrian]. In collaboration with the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, Swatch created a watch called the "Red Shiny Line (SUOZ297)" which pays tribute to Mondrian's "New York City, 3". This was followed in 2022 by the watch "RED, BLUE AND WHITE, BY PIET MONDRIAN (SUOZ344)" which celebrates the painting Composition in Red, Blue and White II as part of a collaboration between Swatch and Centre Pompidou. The building facades and design details of Chun Yeung Estate, a public housing estate in Fo Tan, Hong Kong, was inspired by geometric elements from Mondrian's work according to the Housing Department's architectural project team. In 2022, Tecno, in Partnership with Museum of Fine Arts, released a Special Edition of their Camon 19 Pro smartphone, incorporating his paintings into its design. From 6 June to 5 October 2014, the Tate Liverpool displayed the largest UK collection of Mondrian's works, in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of his death. Mondrian and his Studios included a life-size reconstruction of his Paris studio. Charles Darwent, in The Guardian, wrote: "With its black floor and white walls hung with moveable panels of red, yellow and blue, the studio at Rue du Départ was not just a place for making Mondrians. It was a Mondrian – and a generator of Mondrians." He has been described as "the world's greatest abstract geometrist". Fourth dimension in art List of refugees List of claims for restitution of Nazi-looted art Mondrian and Theosophy Pääsky, Jaana (2019). The Evening is Over, the Beauty Remains: A Semiotic Study of Piet Mondrian's Text "Natural Reality and Abstract Reality" (Ph.D. thesis). University of Helsinki. ISBN 978-951-51-4875-9. Piet Mondrian at the Museum of Modern Art Mondrian Trust – the holder of reproduction rights to Mondrian's works Piet Mondrian Papers. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. RKD and Kunstmuseum Den Haag website – functions as a portal to information on the life and work of Mondrian Many sourced quotes of Piet Mondrian and biography-facts in De Stijl 1917–1931 – The Dutch Contribution to Modern Art, by H. L. C. Jaffé. J. M. Meulenhoff, Amsterdam 1956. Piet Mondrian: The Transatlantic Paintings at harvardartmuseums.org Mondrian collection at Guggenheim, New York

5. Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525 - 1569)

With an HPI of 79.94, Pieter Bruegel the Elder is the 5th most famous Dutch Painter.  His biography has been translated into 82 different languages.

Pieter Bruegel (also Brueghel or Breughel) the Elder ( BROY-gəl, also US: BROO-gəl; Dutch: [ˈpitər ˈbrøːɣəl] ; c. 1525–1530 – 9 September 1569) was among the most significant artists of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting, a painter and printmaker, known for his landscapes and peasant scenes (so-called genre painting); he was a pioneer in presenting both types of subject as large paintings. He was a formative influence on Dutch Golden Age painting and later painting in general in his innovative choices of subject matter, as one of the first generation of artists to grow up when religious subjects had ceased to be the natural subject matter of painting. He also painted no portraits, the other mainstay of Netherlandish art. After his training and travels to Italy, he returned in 1555 to settle in Antwerp, where he worked mainly as a prolific designer of prints for the leading publisher of the day. At the end of the 1550s, he made painting his main medium, and all his famous paintings come from the following period of little more than a decade before his early death in 1569, when he was probably in his early forties. In the 20th and 21st centuries, Bruegel's works have inspired artists in both the literary arts and in cinema. His painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, now thought only to survive in copies, is the subject of the final lines of the 1938 poem "Musée des Beaux Arts" by W. H. Auden. Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky refers to Bruegel's paintings in his films several times, including Solaris (1972) and The Mirror (1975). Director Lars von Trier also uses Bruegel's paintings in his film Melancholia (2011). In 2011, the film The Mill and the Cross was released featuring Bruegel's The Procession to Calvary (Bruegel).

6. Hieronymus Bosch (1450 - 1516)

With an HPI of 79.51, Hieronymus Bosch is the 6th most famous Dutch Painter.  His biography has been translated into 82 different languages.

Hieronymus Bosch (, Dutch: [ɦijeːˈroːnimʏz ˈbɔs] ; born Jheronimus van Aken [jeːˈroːnimʏs fɑn ˈaːkə(n)]; c. 1450 – 9 August 1516) was a Dutch painter from Brabant. He is one of the most notable representatives of the Early Netherlandish painting school. His work, generally oil on oak wood, mainly contains fantastic illustrations of religious concepts and narratives. Within his lifetime, his work was collected in the Netherlands, Austria, and Spain, and widely copied, especially his macabre and nightmarish depictions of hell. Little is known of Bosch's life, though there are some records. He spent most of it in the town of 's-Hertogenbosch, where he was born in his grandfather's house. The roots of his forefathers are in Nijmegen and Aachen (which is visible in his surname: Van Aken). His pessimistic fantastical style cast a wide influence on northern art of the 16th century, with Pieter Bruegel the Elder being his best-known follower. Today, Bosch is seen as a highly individualistic painter with deep insight into humanity's desires and deepest fears. Attribution has been especially difficult; today only about 25 paintings are confidently given to his hand along with eight drawings. About another half-dozen paintings are confidently attributed to his workshop. His most acclaimed works consist of a few triptych altarpieces, including The Garden of Earthly Delights.

7. Gerrit Dou (1613 - 1675)

With an HPI of 69.43, Gerrit Dou is the 7th most famous Dutch Painter.  His biography has been translated into 34 different languages.

Gerrit Dou (7 April 1613 – 9 February 1675), also known as Gerard Douw or Dow, was a Dutch Golden Age painter, whose small, highly polished paintings are typical of the Leiden fijnschilders. He specialised in genre scenes and is noted for his trompe-l'œil "niche" paintings and candlelit night-scenes with strong chiaroscuro. He was a student of Rembrandt. Dou was born in Leiden, where his father was a manufacturer of stained-glass. He studied drawing under Bartholomeus Dolendo, and then trained in the stained-glass workshop of Pieter Couwenhorn. In February 1628, at the age of fourteen, his father sent him to study painting in the studio of Rembrandt (then aged about 21) who lived nearby. From Rembrandt, with whom he remained for about three years, he acquired his skill in colouring and in the more subtle effects of chiaroscuro, and his master's style is reflected in several of his earlier pictures, notably a self-portrait at the age of 22 in the Bridgewater Collection, and in the Blind Tobit going to meet his Son, at Wardour Castle [locations may be outdated]. At a comparatively early point in his career, however, he developed a distinctive manner of his own which diverged considerably from Rembrandt's, cultivating a minute and elaborate style of treatment. He is said to have spent five days in painting a hand, and his work was so fine that he found it necessary to manufacture his own brushes. Notwithstanding the minuteness of his touch, the general effect was harmonious and free from stiffness, and his colour was always fresh and transparent. He often represented subjects in lantern or candle light, the effects of which he reproduced with an unparalleled fidelity and skill. He often painted with the aid of a concave lens combined with a convex mirror (the former sharpening perception, the latter providing a rightway-up image to paint from), and to obtain exactness looked at his subject through a frame crossed with squares of silk thread. His practice as a portrait painter, which was at first considerable, gradually declined, sitters being unwilling to give him the time that he deemed necessary. His pictures were always small in size. More than 200 are attributed to him, and examples are to be found in most of the major public collections of Europe. His chef-d'oeuvre is generally considered to be The Dropsical Woman (1663), and The Dutch Housewife (1650), both in the Louvre. The Evening School, in the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum, is the best example of the candlelight scenes in which he excelled. In the National Gallery, London, favorable specimens are to be seen in the Poulterer's Shop (1672), and a self-portrait (see above). Dou's pictures brought high prices, and one patron, Pieter Spiering, who acted as Swedish Ambassador in The Hague from the mid-1630s, paid him 500 guilders annually simply for the right of first refusal of his latest works. Queen Christina of Sweden owned eleven paintings by Dou, and Cosimo III de' Medici visited his house, where he may have bought at least one of the works now in the Uffizi. The Dutch royal court itself, however, preferred work of a more classical tendency. Dou died in Leiden. His most noted pupils were Frans van Mieris the Elder and Gabriël Metsu. He also taught Bartholomeus Maton, Carel de Moor, Matthijs Naiveu, Abraham de Pape, Godfried Schalcken, Pieter Cornelisz van Slingelandt, Domenicus van Tol, Gijsbert Andriesz Verbrugge, and Pieter Hermansz Verelst. Gerrit Dou's self-portraits A considerable amount was written about Dou in his own lifetime; for instance, Philips Angels praises Dou in his Lof der Schilderkunst for his imitation of nature and his visual illusions. Angels also stresses how Dou's paintings expressed the paragone debate current around that time. The debate was an ongoing competition between painting, sculpture and poetry as to which was the best representation of nature. It was especially popular in Leiden where the painters were seeking to obtain the rights of a guild from the town council in order to have laws for their economic protection. The paragone debate is not only addressed in writings from that time but is also reflected in the subject matter of several of Dou's paintings. An example of this is the Old Painter at work, in which an old painter is shown working on a canvas behind a table displaying objects that show his capabilities of imitation. The aged painter refers to an argument in the paragone debate that a painter can achieve his best work at an old age, while a sculptor cannot because of the physical demands of sculpting. On the table, a sculptured head and a printed book are rendered in a lifelike fashion to show that painting can imitate both sculpture and printed paper, thereby reinforcing the notion that painting trumps sculpture. According to Sluijter, the "amazing true-to-life peacock and a beautiful Triton shell, next to a copper pot with the most refined reflections of light" show that art beats nature. Sluijter argues that the peacock stands for the ability of painting to "preserve the transient works of nature thereby even surpassing it". [Sluijter, 2000] Difficulties arise when an artist wants to associate a certain meaning with a specific object. One of the most troublesome and thus one of the most instructive objects in Dou's oeuvre is a relief by François Duquesnoy called Putti Teasing a Goat. This relief features in many of Dou's pictures with a window-sill motif, and has been assigned various meanings. J. A. Emmens, for example, states that in The Trumpeter the relief represents "the deceitfulness of human desires, because the goat, personifying lust, can time and again be deceived by appearance, by the deceptive imitation, which is the mask". [Emmens, Opstellen, cit. (note 4), vol. 2, p 183 in Hecht, 2002] The Kitchen Maid with a Boy in a Window features a maidservant, fish and a little boy holding a hare, cramped together with a bunch of vegetables, a dead bird and copperware. Sluijter acknowledges that a contemporary viewer would have certainly approved of this scene as representing an approximation of life since the rendering of all the material is very realistic. On the overall series of maidservant-scenes, Sluijter remarks that the image of a maidservant was generally associated with a sexual undertone. According to de Jongh, this motif has erotic references. In his article on Erotica in 17th-century genre pieces, de Jongh argues that dead hunted birds and animals most likely all refer to the notion of eroticism and availability of the woman depicted because birding and hunting were synonyms for sexual encounters. All images of maidservants accompanied by dead birds or animals refer to hunting and vogelen (birding), which in Dutch means to copulate. The maidservants are thereby explicitly erotic. Certainly, a cock as a bird refers to a cock as the male sex organ and this can be seen hanging from the wall in Kitchen Maid with a Boy in a Window. [de Jongh, 1968–1969] De Jongh´s erotic interpretations can be disputed regarding the paintings by Gerard Dou because he depicts his dead chicks and furry hares not only with seductive maidservants but also as props in motifs with old servants, or in domestic household scenes, such as The Young Mother (1658). Additionally, to objects possibly having a deeper meaning via emblem books, complete scenes in Dou's oeuvre have been related to scenes depicted in emblem books or prints. The Girl Pouring Water is a variation of the theme Educatio prima bona sit from Boissards Vesuntini emblemata. This emblem depicts the moral that "children absorb knowledge like a pot absorbs water". The gaining of knowledge is represented by a little boy standing in the background while the water is poured in the foreground. [Hollander, 2002] One painting that is strongly associated with an emblem is the Night School. This particular painting is rather anecdotal in character. Baer disagrees with Hecht who refers to this painting as being merely a demonstration of Dou's abilities to work with artificial light. Baer identifies the candle lights with the light of understanding, and she relates the unlit lantern on the left wall with ignorance, which is combated by teaching, represented by the lit lantern in the middle of the floor. Additionally, Baer suggests that the girl at the left is a representation of Cognitione because she strikes the same pose as in Cesare Ripa's Iconologia. Like Ripa's emblem, the girl in Dou's painting holds a candle while pointing towards a line of text. The essence of Ripa's emblem is that "like our eyes, which need light to see, so our reason needs our senses, especially that of sight, to achieve true understanding". [Baer, 2001] Dou's work commanded high prices long after his death, until the 1860s. Soon after, he fell into near complete obscurity. For example, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art held in an exhibit to introduce Dutch art, it featured 37 by Rembrandt, 20 by Hals, but none by Dou. His obscurity continued until the 1970s when his reputation was reestablished and has continued since. The Night School (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) 1628: Astronomer (Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg) 1631.1632 Old Woman Reading (formerly known as Rembrandt's Mother) (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) 1630s: Portrait of a Girl (Manchester Art Gallery, UK) 1631: Prince Rupert (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) 1635–1636: Still Life with a Boy Blowing Soap-Bubbles (National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo) 1635–1640: Portrait of a Man (National Gallery, London) 1637: An Interior with a Young Violinist (National Galleries of Scotland) 1640s: Portrait of a Young Woman (National Gallery, London) 1640–1645: Portrait of a Man (Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg) 1642–1647: St. Jerome in the Desert (Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, New York) 1645: The Schoolmaster (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) 1646: Girl Chopping Onions (Royal Collection, London) 1647: Still Life With Book and Purse (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) 1650: The Dutch Housewife (Louvre, Paris) 1650s: The Young Mother (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin) 1650s: Self Portrait (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) 1650s: Self-portrait at the Window (Residenzgalerie, Salzburg) 1658-1665: Young Woman with a Lighted Candle at a Window (Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid) 1652: The Quack Doctor (Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam) 1653:The Physician (Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, Christchurch, New Zealand) 1653: The Violin Player (Liechtenstein Palace, Vienna) 1655: Old Woman Cutting Bread (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) 1655: Astronomer by Candlelight (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) 1658: The Young Mother (Mauritshuis, The Hague) 1660s: The Nursery (Lost with the sinking of the Vrouw Maria in 1771) 1660–1665: Dentist by Candlelight (Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth) 1660–1665: Old Woman Unreeling Threads (Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg) 1660–1665: Soldier Bather (Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg) 1660-1665: Woman Bather (Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg) 1660-1665: Self-portrait (Louvre, Paris) 1661: A Hermit (Wallace Collection, London) 1663: The Dropsical Woman (Louvre, Paris) 1663: Woman at a Window with a Copper Bowl of Apples and a Cock Pheasant (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) 1665: A Lady playing a Clavichord (Dulwich Picture Gallery, London) 1670: A Hermit Praying (Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota) 1670: The Hermit (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) 1670s: A Poulterer's Shop (National Gallery, London) 1670–75: The Herring Seller (Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg) Self Portrait (National Gallery, London) Portrait of a Young Man (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) Evening Light (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) Young Man (The Hague) The Cook (Louvre, Paris) The Spinner (Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation) The Spinning Reel (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco) The Reader (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco) Portrait of an Unknown Gentleman (Museum of Fine Arts at the University of Montana, Missoula) Dog at Rest (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) Gerrit Dou's works In Honoré de Balzac's 1831 novel La Peau de chagrin, the curiosity shop Raphaël de Valentin enters in the opening sequence contains, among other paintings, "a Gerald Dow which resembled a page of Sterne," and the old shopkeeper is compared to "Gerald Dow's Money-Changer." In the comic opera The Pirates of Penzance, by Gilbert and Sullivan, the Major-General brags of being able to distinguish works by Raphael from works by Dou and Johan Zoffany. Dou (as "Gerard Douw") is a character in J. Sheridan Le Fanu's short story "Schalken the Painter". In the 1979 BBC television adaptation of this work, Schalcken the Painter, he was played by Maurice Denham. Dou is portrayed on film by Toby Jones in Nightwatching (2007). W. F. Harvey's short story "Old Masters" features a picture by Dou (as Gerhard Dow) as the subject of an ingenious scam. (The story is included in the 2009 Wordsworth Edition omnibus collection of Harvey's stories, "The Beast with Five Fingers".) A group of boys in Mary Mapes Dodge's Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates visit a museum in Amsterdam and see two paintings by "Gerard Douw"--"The Hermit" and "Evening School." In the 2023 film, “The Little Mermaid” Dou’s painting, Astronomer by Candlelight, is featured as a page in a book which the mermaid, Ariel, flips though while singing “Part of Your World”. This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Douw, Gerhard". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 8 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 451. Baer, Ronni (2000). "The Life and Art of Gerrit Dou". In Wheelock, Arthur K. (ed.). Gerrit Dou 1613–75: Master Painter in the Age of Rembrandt (exhibition catalogue). National Gallery of Art Washington; Yale University Press. ISBN 0-89468-248-2. Gerrit Dou (1613–1675): Master Painter in the Age of Rembrandt at the National Gallery of Art 58 artworks by or after Gerrit Dou at the Art UK site Works at WGA Works and literature Oldandsold.com Vermeer and The Delft School, a full text exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has material on Gerrit Dou

8. Jan Steen (1626 - 1679)

With an HPI of 69.13, Jan Steen is the 8th most famous Dutch Painter.  His biography has been translated into 49 different languages.

Jan Havickszoon Steen (c. 1626 – buried 3 February 1679) was a Dutch Golden Age painter, one of the leading genre painters of the 17th century. His works are known for their psychological insight, sense of humour and abundance of colour.

9. Theo van Gogh (1857 - 1891)

With an HPI of 68.57, Theo van Gogh is the 9th most famous Dutch Painter.  His biography has been translated into 38 different languages.

Theodorus van Gogh (Dutch: [teːjoːˈdoːrʏs ˈteːjoː vɑŋ ˈɣɔx]; 1 May 1857 – 25 January 1891) was a Dutch art dealer and the younger brother of Vincent van Gogh. Known as Theo, his support of his older brother's artistic ambitions and well being allowed Vincent to devote himself entirely to painting. As an art dealer, Theo van Gogh played a crucial role in introducing contemporary French art to the public. Theo died at the age of 33, six months after his brother's death at age 37. Theo owned almost all of his brother's artwork. Theo's widow Johanna van Gogh-Bonger worked to promote the work of Vincent and keep the memory of her husband alive. In 1914, Theo van Gogh's remains were buried next to those of his brother Vincent.

10. Jacob van Ruisdael (1628 - 1682)

With an HPI of 67.77, Jacob van Ruisdael is the 10th most famous Dutch Painter.  His biography has been translated into 42 different languages.

Jacob Isaackszoon van Ruisdael (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈjaːkɔp fɑn ˈrœyzˌdaːl] ; c. 1629 – 10 March 1682) was a Dutch painter, draughtsman, and etcher. He is generally considered the pre-eminent landscape painter of the Dutch Golden Age, a period of great wealth and cultural achievement when Dutch painting became highly popular. Prolific and versatile, Ruisdael depicted a wide variety of landscape subjects. From 1646 he painted Dutch countryside scenes of remarkable quality for a young man. After a trip to Germany in 1650, his landscapes took on a more heroic character. In his late work, conducted when he lived and worked in Amsterdam, he added city panoramas and seascapes to his regular repertoire. In these, the sky often took up two-thirds of the canvas. In total he produced more than 150 Scandinavian views featuring waterfalls. Ruisdael's only registered pupil was Meindert Hobbema, one of several artists who painted figures in his landscapes. Hobbema's work has at times been confused with Ruisdael's. Ruisdael always spelt his name thus: Ruisdael, not Ruysdael. Ruisdael's work was in demand in the Dutch Republic during his lifetime. Today it is spread across private and institutional collections around the world; the National Gallery in London, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg hold the largest collections. Ruisdael shaped landscape painting traditions worldwide, from the English Romantics to the Barbizon school in France, and the Hudson River School in the US, and influenced generations of Dutch landscape artists.