Louis Apol

Apol painted snow. Woods under snow, mostly, almost nobody in them, and just enough of a fence or a footbridge to say that someone had passed. He was born in The Hague in 1850 and died there in 1936, taught as a boy by two local landscape painters his father hired, and awarded a stipend by King Willem III in 1868.

In 1880 an invitation arrived that suited a winter specialist exactly. The polar schooner Willem Barents was sailing north to Nova Zembla with a scientific party aboard, and Apol went with them for four months, filling some 200 pencil sketches and watercolours with ice.

He was still working that material 16 years later. In 1896 he finished a painted panorama of Nova Zembla in Amsterdam, 120 metres around and 14 metres high, installed in the panorama building on the Plantage Middenlaan. Queen Emma and the young Wilhelmina came to see it in April 1897. Public interest ran out around 1901, the canvas was rolled up into the building's attic, and the building itself was pulled down in 1935, the year before Apol died.