Simon Maris - oil on canvas, hand signed bottom right

Simon Maris was a student of his father Willem Maris and subsequently studied at the Academy of Visual Arts in The Hague and at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. He then spent some time in Brussels and made study trips to Paris and Italy. In 1900 he settled in Amsterdam. In 1903 he traveled to Spain for a few months with his friend Piet Mondriaan. Together with Mondriaan and Arnold Marc Gorter, he would regularly paint at the Gein in the following years, where he also drew Mondriaan's portrait in 1906. After his marriage to Cornelia den Breejen in 1908, he worked regularly in Zandvoort during the summers.

Maris became especially famous as a portraitist, often of worldly women, often on commission. He also made more informal portraits, often of mothers with children or reading women, regularly with his wife and children as models. He also painted cityscapes, beach scenes, landscapes and still lifes. He worked in both a realistic and impressionistic style, with a lot of attention to the effect of sunlight. His work shows a striking affinity with that of Albert Roelofs, also the son of a well-known Hague scholar, Willem Roelofs.

Maris was a well-known figure in Amsterdam artist circles around 1900. He died in 1935, aged 61. His work is in the collections of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, the Dordrechts Museum, the Drents Museum in Assen, the Groninger Museum, the Gemeentemuseum The Hague and the Gemeentemuseum Arnhem.