This biography from the Archives of AskART:
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 A realist painter and photographer from Holland, George Hendrik
Breitner did painting that was very popular among the general public
but was disdainful to many late 19th/early 20th century art critics
because at a time when modernism and its abstractions were taking hold,
he promoted realism. He saw himself as the painter of the people,
and the people responded with great fondness for his work. Among
his favorite subjects were city scenes with working-class people in
low-income neighborhoods such as servant girls and construction
workers. He was also a painter of female nudes and received
criticism for them for being too real and not promoting idealistic
beauty.
Early in his career, from 1877 to 1883, he was financially supported in
this return to realism by A.P. van Stolk, a man interested in art and
dedicated to influencing its directions. However, van Stolk and
Breitner had a falling out because Breitner had a unique style that did
not conform to the conservative leanings of van Stolk. Also
influencing Breitner in his stand against modernism was his association
in the 1880s with 'De Tachtigers' (The Eighties) a Dutch group of
artists.
Breitner received his early art education from 1876 to 1880 at the Art
Academy in the Hague, and there he received much encouragement for his
talents. For the last year of his attendance there, he taught art
at the Leiden academy, Ars Aemula Naturae. Then in 1880, he was
expelled from the Academy in Hague for destroying a board that posted a
list of their regulations. That year, he lived at Loosduinen, the
home of realist landscape painter Willem Maris, and he was voted into
membership into Pulchri Studio, a prestigious artist society in The
Hague.
In 1882, Breitner began working with Vincent Van Gogh, and they painted
together in the poorer sections of The Hague. In 1886, he began
painting instruction at the Rijksacademie of Amsterdam, but he left as
it soon became obvious that the curriculum was not challenging to him.
Beginning in the 1890s, photography became available, and using cameras
fed his special interest in capturing movement and the play of light
against dark. From that time, many of his paintings are set
in cloudy-day lighting, and today when city streets in Holland are
rainy and grey, some people say: "Echt Breitnerweer", meaning in
English, Typical Breitnerweather.
By the early 20th century, Breitner was quite famous in his own
country, and in 1901, a well-received retrospective exhibition of his
work was held at the Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam. He traveled
to the United States in 1909 to jury the Carnegie International
Exhibition in Pittsburgh, but going beyond his own boundaries, he and
others realized that his fame was mostly confined to Holland. And
living until 1923, he never adopted the popular 'isms' such as Cubism,
Futurism, Impressionism, and Expressionism.
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hendrik_Breitner
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