As a little child he took possession of every bit of scrap of paper which he could lay his hands on to make drawings on it. Once, there was a furniture-removing van, on the opposite. He made a picture of this van and, though he could not yet write, he wrote the name "Kooyman" as seen on the van. His parents resolved to let him have drawing and painting lessons at the early age of 11. He had to travel during his free afternoons by a little steamtram to Rotterdam where he learned and worked at his master's studio.
When he became 18 he successfully passed the final examinations of the secondary school (high school), taking in his stride the elementary school teaching certificate for designing. His parents then moved to The Hague where Hugo Landheer visited the Academy of Arts of Design for 3½ years, where he also modelled and followed the painting class. He passed his examinations in History of Art. So, he became entitled to teach at the Academy.

At the same time he started painting in the evening and sometimes even during the night. After having teached at the Academy during 3½ years, he began painting for himself. Notwithstanding this, he liked teaching and he always enjoyed having private pupils when he could find the time to spare for it.
In 1935 he moved from The Hague to a small village, called Epe, in the eastern part of The Netherlands, in order to be able to work quietly.
After the war together with his wife he travelled widely and visited approx. 14 European countries. During these travels, he made many sketches, which he mostly used later on.
In 1963 he moved again, this time to a village near Haarlem, where he had, during 25 years, his own permanent exhibition in his house, of about 50 paintings, over the years in different variety.

His style developed in the twenties and thirties when the artistic climate was strongly fluctuating. Both abroad and in The Netherlands innumerable new school of paintings arose, the most leading and influential of which turned out to be cubism, expressionism and futurism. The adopted stylistic features were of course placed in the service of one's own artistic personality and talent. With the artists this resulted in an individual style of their own. In Hugo Landheer's work of the twenties and thirties in particular (works, rejected after the war by the artist himself!), the colour palette, the division into planes, the application of different perspective levels in one image, and a partial abstraction beared witness in this influence.
After this period, however, when he was virtually only making oil paintings, he developed his own style. This was especially charakterized by the composition of the picture by means of colours. The colorite applied in all tones in an extremely varied manner, greatly defines the atmosphere: sometimes exuberant, communicative and accessible, sometimes subdued, somber, and defensive. The themes of the works he made showed a remarkable continuity throughout the entire period.
The subjects that have formed a constant source of inspiration to Hugo Landheer are: townscapes (especially Schiedam), villages and landscapes (both rural Dutch and foreign), (lift)bridges, cattle and other domesticated animals, old windmills, farmhouses, (church or vault)interiors and a couple of portraits.

As to the way of working: Preceding his final work were, apart from rough pencil or charcoal sketches, extensive preparations in the form of colour studies -used purely to define the palette- from which always one was suitable for his purpose and, finally, a preliminary study in oils on paper or cardboard.

So, in all these years, he made and kept dozens and dozens of such black/white sketches and colour studies.
It might also be of interest to know that Hugo Landheer made such preliminary sketches and studies on all kinds of fresh or even used on one side paper or cardboard, white, coloured, even on black paper, gold or silver, just different colours, abstract.

Then he finally started painting on the white linen. With a hard pencil he made the drawing on this linen. Afterwards he made a layer of tempera colours (tempera is made on a basis of albuminoid) on the linen, as a base. Next day, when this layer has dried, he made the first layer in oil paint, with paint and then oil and so he went on until he was satisfied. However, it happened more than once that after a couple of years he was no longer content with the work in question and he started modifying it or sometimes he even destroyed the work.

In his last period of life, 1988 (after the death of his wife) - 1995, due to personal circumstances he had to abandon this way of painting: From then on he made only small oil paint pictures without initially setting up tempera and with a coulour example not specially created but chosen from the stock left and the subject finding in periodicals, papers or old post cards that he saved in the course of so many years. Yet, he painted every day, until owing to physical circumstances, he had to give up in 1992. His last pupil had to say good-bye in 1995, a couple of months before the painter rather suddenly died on 25th September 1995, practically lonesome.

The reviews and the survey of the dozens of the exhibitions held, show that the person and the work of Hugo Landheer have always attracted the attention of great parts of the public and the museums during his long, 70-year career.