Jurjen de Haan belongs to the postwar generation of painters from The Hague. He trained at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague with Co Westerik and others. Initially influenced by the Cobra language with its wondrous creatures, in the 1980s he, like Maarten van Dreeven, turned to photorealism. Then he definitely takes a new path with brightly colored lyrical abstract canvases. 'I work agile in bold paint on large formats' he once very simply summed up his work. Jurjen de Haan was chairman of Pulchri Studio from 1983-1988 and a teacher at the Arnhem School of the Arts from 1963 to 2011.