Joseph Thors (circa 1835-1920) Dutch/British, (2) Oil on Canvas Landscapes. One is mid-day, the other at sunset. Matching ornate frames and sizes, one with a visible signature on the back and the other with an informative label attached to the back. 

Overall Size: 12 x 10 in. 

Sight Size: 8 x 6 in. 

#5988 #8 . 

Joseph Thors (c. 1835-1920) was a landscape artist whose work was exhibited widely in England during the late 19th Century. Relatively little is known about Thors’s early life, but he was born in Amsterdam in The Netherlands in the mid 1830s, where he likely began his earliest studies in oil painting under Dutch masters. By 1861 he was lodging at 115 Great Russell Street, Finsbury, in London, and the following year he married Hendrina Mendelsohn, a native of Utrecht. After travelling extensively to France for further studies he began exhibiting throughout Birmingham in the late 1860s, soon becoming part of the Society of British Artists in London. In the 1870s and 80s he routinely showed his work alongside others at the Royal Academy of Arts and was associated with many members of the newly disbanded British Institution. His style mostly came to emulate the Norwich School, crafting idyllic English countryside scenes that almost always featured cottages and animals. He occasionally painted coastlines and rivers as well, particularly in his later years. By the mid 1890s he, his wife, and their three children had outgrown their smaller quarters in the heart of London and moved to Islington, where he continued to work until his death in 1920. His lifetime output was prolific, believed to be between four and six hundred total works, with many of his pieces still on public display in hunting lodges, educational institutions, and lordly estates throughout the United Kingdom today.