July ('Summer Luxuriance')

Jac van Looy painted this field of lupins around 1900 near his home in Soest, a village in the province of Utrecht. His house shows on the horizon under the evening sky, three hay wagons drawn by horses move along the raised road at the right, and in the foreground a terracotta flowerpot lies tipped over among the blue flowers. The picture belongs to a series on the twelve months, which is why its title is simply July, and Zomerweelde, summer abundance, is the name it goes by. He painted these fields out of doors, closer in spirit to Monet's flower pictures than to the grey polder views of the Hague School, the older generation of Dutch landscape painters. The canvas is 170 centimetres wide. It belongs to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, which received it as a gift from the artist's friends, and hangs in the Rijksmuseum on loan.