Panorama bij Holzhausen

Around 1910, Simon Moulijn packed his paints for one of his landscape trips into Germany and stopped at the village of Holzhausen. What he brought back was this wide panorama, worked in oil on a small wooden panel. The medium is worth a second look, because Moulijn had built his reputation on lithographs, landscape prints pulled from stone. Here he was working outdoors in oil instead, laying colour onto the panel to hold a broad, open view. He kept the composition calm and horizontal, letting the land stretch across the little board rather than filling it with incident. The panel belongs today to the Netherlands' national art collection, shared between the Kröller-Müller Museum at Otterlo and the Drents Museum, where it currently hangs.