Herring Smokehouse

For years this picture was a door. Hendrik Willem Mesdag, the Hague painter of the huge circular Panorama of Scheveningen, had the sliding doors of his studio fitted with eight painted panels, each one made for him by a fellow artist. Sadee's panel shows women at work in a herring smokehouse, the trade the village of Scheveningen lived off. After Mesdag's death the panels were taken out of the doors and dispersed. This one was traced and bought back in 2018, and it went on view with the Mesdag Collection in The Hague, which the Van Gogh Museum looks after.