Landschap met berken

August Le Gras made his name with animals and with the scenes he brought home from Algeria: camels, donkeys, the light and clamour of North African streets he studied on his travels. This oil sits a long way from that world. It is a stand of birches, pale trunks in the thin light of Dutch woodland. Around 1905 Le Gras settled in Laren, a village east of Amsterdam that had filled with painters drawn to its heath and quiet country, and it is that ordinary countryside he set down here rather than anything exotic. No firm date is recorded for the picture, one reason it stays in the shadow of his better-known travel work. It is kept today at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, among the Dutch national art collection.