LEEN, Willem van
Dutch painter. He was the third child of Jan van Leen and Johanna Koeberg. His father was a painter and owned a jewelry and art store in Dordrecht. After training with his father, Willem van Leen had lessons from other painters of Dordrecht. At the age of twenty he left for Paris, where he studied flower painting for three years. He was one of a number of gifted Dutch artists who worked and studied in Paris in the late eighteenth century. There he was influenced by his friend, the Dutch painter Gerard van Spaendonck.
Back in Dordrecht in 1776 he joined the national guard, the Cloveniers. Due to the political unrest in Dordrecht between patriots and William VI of Orange, van Leen returned to Paris in 1788 where the Grand Duchess of Russia commissioned him for designing wall decorations in the Pavlovsk Palace in St. Petersburg. Despite the French Revolution in 1789 he remained in Paris to live and work. After his return to the Netherlands in 1806 he settled in Delfshaven. He remained unmarried and lived with three cousins. In 1811 he was appointed councilor in Delfshaven and he led this post until his death in 1825. Van Leen’s paintings are in the collections of the Dordrechts Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York,the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, England and in private collections.
