Francis van der Weegen was born in Tilburg, Netherlands, on 1 October 1851. He immigrated to England no later than 1901, painting in Alton, Hampshire, and later in Grays, Essex. His oil paintings depict ordinary local scenes in a direct and descriptive manner. Francis van der Weegen died in 1930 in Grays, Essex, England.
Landscape painter Francis van der Weegen was born Franciscus Henricus van der Weegen in Tilburg, a textile-manufacturing town in the province of North Brabant in the southern Netherlands, on 1 October 1851, son of Hubertus van der Weegen (1816-1858) and Johanna Maria van Puijenbroek (1813-1858). The 1901 census, which records his age as 49, supports this date, although Art UK gives c.1854. Details of his artistic training are not recorded, and Lobley and Way describe him as a ‘Dutch amateur artist’ (2022, p. 93). His wife, Sophia, was born in Belgium circa 1856, and their only daughter, Gabrielle, was born in Antwerp circa 1883. Van der Weegen immigrated to the UK no later than 1901, when the census records the family living in St Pancras, London, with Francis giving his profession as ‘Artist Painter’. Gabrielle was then a pupil teacher in London, as was Herbert Alldridge Abbott. Gabrielle and Abbott married in the parish of St Peter, Blackburn, Lancashire, on 4 August 1909, and the marriage record describes van der Weegen as a ‘Gentleman’ (ibid.).
From 1911 to 1918, Abbott was headmaster of Eggar’s Grammar School in Alton, Hampshire, and van der Weegen, who appears to have lived in the household, painted at least five canvases of the school and the surrounding countryside, including Eggars Grammar School, Alton (1912) and View of Anstey Lane, Alton (1913) (ibid.). In 1918, Abbott became headmaster of Palmer’s School for Boys in Grays, Essex, a post he held until 1946 (The Times, 1963). The 1921 census records Francis and Sophia van der Weegen living with the Abbott family and their two children at the headmaster’s house, and describes them as Dutch nationals resident in Britain (Lobley and Way, 2022, p. 94). Apart from the Alton and Grays canvases, few paintings by him are recorded. They include A Summer’s Day in Regents Park (1907) and An Ornamental Garden with Lily Pond, together with two works in a Dutch manner attributed to him, Seaside with Fisherfolk and an undated interior genre scene in seventeenth-century style. His most productive period, judging from the surviving works, appears to have been between about 1907 and 1928 (ibid., p. 95).
Van der Weegen worked in oil on canvas, recording ordinary local scenes, such as lanes, school buildings and cultivated fields, in a direct and descriptive manner. His best-documented works are two views of the allotments at Globe Pit, a former brickfield and chalk quarry to the south of Palmer’s School: Allotments (1918) and Globe Pit, Grays (1928). Both appear to have been painted from an upstairs window of the headmaster’s house, looking south across the allotments towards the Thames (Lobley, 2023, pp. 39, 42). The allotments were probably established as part of the wartime drive for food production that followed the German blockade of merchant shipping in 1917 (Lobley and Way, 2022, p. 92). The 1918 painting shows a regular pattern of crops and bare soil with two figures at work, while in the 1928 canvas the enlarged working face of the pit appears as an area of warm yellow and the allotments occupy a smaller part of the composition. Lobley and Way identify the two works as rare early depictions of English allotments, noting that only about six allotment paintings on Art UK date from before 1930 (ibid., pp. 85-86). They compare the 1918 canvas with Arthur Temple Felix Clay’s Kensington Palace Exterior, South Front (1918), which shares its ‘bleakness’, and place the 1928 canvas alongside Francis Dodd’s Gardens at Hammersmith Allotments (1929) as ‘a rural vision of productivity within the framework of a more urban outlook’ (ibid., p. 91). They also observe that three of the earliest painters of allotments in Britain, George Clausen, Lucien Pissarro and van der Weegen, had connections with mainland Europe, where the search for realism was widespread and allotments did not carry the same associations with political unrest (ibid., p. 95).
By 1939, the extension of the Globe Works had destroyed much of the allotment site (ibid., p. 92). In April 2023, the two Grays paintings were cleaned and restored by Clare Finn & Co. Ltd, with funding from the Thurrock Local History Society and the Essex Gardens Trust (Lobley, 2023, p. 45). No exhibitions of his work, either during his lifetime or since, have been traced in the sources consulted. His widow, Sophia, continued to live with the Abbott family after his death, until her own death in 1942 (Lobley and Way, 2022, p. 94). Francis van der Weegen died in Grays, Thurrock, Essex, England in 1930. His works are held in UK public collections, including Hampshire County Council’s Fine Art Collection (Hampshire Cultural Trust), Winchester, and Thurrock Museum, Grays.
Michal Mel