Landscape with Dunes

The name on this canvas usually turns up under prints, not paintings. Johannes Josephus Aarts is remembered for the slow craft of cutting lines into copper, for dark engravings and, later, grim visionary scenes. This comes from before all that. In 1895 he was 24, out in the dunes with oil paint, catching the low light of the Dutch coast in small, loose dabs rather than the patient black lines he would build his reputation on. The Kröller-Müller Museum later gathered it into a show called Clouds and Light: Impressionism in Holland, among painters who were letting the grey tonal landscape of the older generation brighten. The horizon sits low and wide across the 70-centimetre canvas, most of it given over to a pale, worked sky.