Paul Joseph Constantin Gabriël
1828–1903 · Dutch · Hague School
The story
Most painters of the Hague School saw the Netherlands in silver and grey, wet skies pressing down on wet land. Paul Joseph Constantin Gabriël disagreed out loud. Our land is not grey, he liked to say, even when the weather is grey, and he spent a career proving it in green.
He was born in Amsterdam in 1828 and trained first at the city's drawing academy, then with the landscape painter Barend Cornelis Koekkoek. Struggling to make his name at home, he moved to Brussels, where his friendship with the older Dutch landscapist Willem Roelofs opened doors and pushed his colours brighter. From there he kept returning to paint the flat Dutch polders, the drainage ditches, the mills, the cattle standing in reflective water.
His best-loved canvas hangs in the Rijksmuseum: a windmill on a polder waterway, painted around 1889 and nicknamed 'In the Month of July.' It is a full summer day, the grass an almost startling green, the mill and the piled clouds doubled in the still water below. He settled at last on the coast at Scheveningen, near The Hague, and went on painting the countryside he called colourful, juicy and fat until his death there in 1903.
