Hamlet in the Snow

A hamlet is a cluster of houses too small to count as a village, and that is what Degouve de Nuncques painted here under deep snow in 1911. In that one year he produced a run of winter pictures now scattered through the Kröller-Müller, among them a barge and a group of boats frozen in on the same white days. This one stays on land: low roofs, bare trees, a lane hushed and emptied by the snowfall. The colours are fresher and lighter than in his earlier work, and the whole scene is held still by the snow that covers it.