Autumn Day

Autumn 1909, in the country near Nijmegen. Gestel had set himself one problem that season, how to get the sensation of autumn light on a hazy day onto a canvas, and his answer was optical. The paint is laid down in bright dots and short streaks that mix in the viewer's eye rather than on the palette. Dutch painters of that moment called the approach luminism, after the Latin word for light.

Look at the sky, which seems to give off a faint glow of its own. That was precisely the effect he was working for. The weather while he stood there was freezing and sunny at the same time, cold enough that he painted in gloves. The canvas belongs to a run of pictures he began that autumn, all of them circling the same question of light.