Landscape

The Van Gogh Museum cannot date this small panel more precisely than somewhere between 1882 and 1903, the last two decades of Weissenbruch's working life. That vagueness is part of what it is. Only about 22 by 32 centimetres, painted in oil on wood, filed by the museum under village view and river view, it belongs to the stream of modest outdoor pieces the Hague School painters produced from the polder country around them, where the water and the sky do most of the work. For most of the 20th century it hung in a private house in The Hague. Its owner, C.L. Kayser, died in 2001 and left it to the Mauritshuis, and since 2011 it has been on long loan to the Van Gogh Museum for the Mesdag Collection, the art gathered by the sea painter Hendrik Willem Mesdag and his wife Sientje. In 2014 the panel travelled to Arles in the south of France, to an exhibition setting the greys of the north against the colours Van Gogh found in the Mediterranean light.