Wilhelmus "Willem" Hendrikus Petrus Johannes Zwart (Also known as William Black), was a Dutch painter, engraver*, watercolorist, with many connections to the Hague School* and later associated with the Amsterdam Impressionism* movement.

Willem De Zwart was born in The Hague on 16 May 1862, the eldest of eight children. His youngest brother, Pieter, would also become a painter. His father painted carriages for a living, and in 1875 the fourteen-year-old Willem was apprenticed to a carriage maker to learn the same trade. In his spare time, he copied prints he found in magazines, and a year later he enrolled in the evening class at the Royal Academy of Visual Art in The Hague. The following year, he was admitted at the studio of J...