Dune View

This is a small thing, a canvas barely 45 centimetres across, painted out in the dunes behind the Dutch coast in 1895. Those sand hills, rolling between the towns and the North Sea, had been a working ground for Dutch painters for decades, close enough to The Hague to reach on foot for an afternoon's light. By the middle 1890s the muted browns and greys the older Hague painters had made their name on were giving way, among younger hands, to stronger colour and brighter skies, and this small view sits in that shift. The Kröller-Müller Museum, which holds it now as number KM 106.616, later showed it in a survey of Dutch light. Aarts kept the scene plain: a low run of sand and marram grass under an open sky, laid down quickly on a surface not much bigger than a sheet of paper.