Gorter, Arnold Marc

Arnold Marc Gorter was born in Almelo in 1866 and moved to Amsterdam in 1884. There he attended the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten located in the newly built Rijksmusem, where he graduated in 1887 and became an instructor in 1889 through 1896. He brought many sketches of Almelo along with him to Amsterdam and it is a space he continually revisited in his work. Gorter's love for the eastern region of the Netherlands is clearly reflected in his ouevre and Gorter would continue to execute landscapes of his native countryside of Twente regularly throughout his career. He painted around the village of Vorden extensively with hundreds of paintings specifically surrounding the Vordense beek, a small river running through the countryside. Most of these were executed after 1904 and he acquired some land in the countryside of Vordense in 1916.

His first solo exhibitions in Almelo and in Amsterdam in the 1890s were quite successful and the art-dealer Frans Buffa & Sons in Amsterdam began to represent him; ultimately he would become one of Frans Buffa's best selling artists, sharing this distinction with Isaac Israels.

He was awarded distinction at exhibition in 1904 and the same year the French government bought a large landscape from him for the Museé du Luxembourg. In 1910 he was given a second-place award and again a medal in Munich in 1905. He exhibited in Germany at the Internationale Kunstausstellungen in Berlin and the Salon des Artistes Français in Paris where he was awarded with numerous honors for his submissions. His first exhibition in the United States was the 1904 Universal Exposition in St. Louis and he made contacts with dealers in the United States for the sale of his paintings to clients there. In 1915 he won a gold medal at the Panama-Pacific World Fair in San Francisco and by this time his sales in Canada and the United States are said to have exceeded that of Holland. In 1923 he was elected for membership in the Académie Française. He served as president of Saint Lucas, an artist society, later graduating to be president of the more prestigious Arti et Amicitiae.