Landscape with a train

In 1887 the railway was still cutting fresh lines across the Dutch polders, and the painters of the Hague School mostly kept it out of their pictures. They preferred the old country: mills, ditches, cattle standing in still water. Their French contemporaries were busy painting stations and steam. The Dutch left the machines out of the frame. Gabriël did the opposite here. Across the flat green land runs a low bank of smoke, a small steam train pulling toward you, and a row of telegraph poles marching beside the track. He had made the studies the winter before, riding out from Scheveningen to a spot near Voorburg, quite possibly on the same train he then painted. The straight rails and the receding poles pull your eye to a single point on the horizon. He called it 'Il vient de loin,' it comes from afar. Some 20 years later this modern little polder became the first painting Helene Kröller-Müller ever bought, the seed of the collection around you.