Constant Cornelis Huijsmans (1 January 1810 – 28 November 1886) was a Dutch art teacher and painter, whose roots go back to the seventeenth-century Antwerp of the landscape painter Cornelis Huysmans (1648–1727). Paintings of the latter are to be found at the Louvre in Paris and at the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Earlier generations of the Huijsmans family used to spell their family name slightly differently, as Huysmans. Early life and family Constant Cornelis Huijsmans was born in Breda on 1 January 1810. He was not only a painter but he was the Principal of the Art Academy in Breda as well as a teacher at the Royal Military Academy, also in Breda. He was the son of the painter and chemist Jacobus Carolus Huijsmans and Maria Elisabeth Beens. In 1854 he married Ludovica Francisca Kerstens (1823–1855), whose father was the owner of a successful brewery in Breda. The French author Joris-Karl Huysmans (Charles-Marie-Georges Huijsmans, 1848–1907) was his nephew. On the occasion of the latter's first major publication of a collection of French poems Huijsmans wrote in a letter dated 26 December 1874 to his nephew “by the way, your name in Dutch is Joris-Karel Huijsmans … you wrote [Jorris-Karl] which is German”. Training and early work (1828–1840) Early years between 1828 and 1840 in Antwerp, Paris and Breda Huijsmans studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and at the Academy of Fine Art in Paris. Initially, he specialized in romantic landscapes, but later he turned to interior scenes. Several of his sketchbooks have survived and some of his early paintings are known. In 1835 he returned home because of his father's going blind. As the eldest of eight children he took upon himself the task to support his family financially and to succeed his father who had been an art teacher at the Art Academy as well as at the Royal Military Academy, both located in Breda. In 1838 Huijsmans became close friends with Pieter Johannes Veth (1814-1895), his colleague (until 1841) at the Koninklijke Militaire Academie. Veth later became professor of Ethnology of the Dutch East Indies at the University of Leiden and the first Chairman of the Royal Netherlands Geographical Society. They kept up a correspondence until Huijsmans died in 1886. Huijsmans managed to combine both his teaching job and his painting and took part in various national exhibitions. Art teaching career