Spakenburg Residents

On 28 May 1932 the last gap in the Afsluitdijk, the great dam across the mouth of the Zuiderzee, was closed, and the inland sea began to turn into a freshwater lake. For fishing villages like Spakenburg, on its southern shore, that ended centuries of fishing for herring and anchovy, and the men had to switch to eel and freshwater fish. In exactly these years Leo Gestel, who lived nearby in Blaricum, kept painting the people of Spakenburg, and this picture of 1934 belongs to that run. A local history of the painter traces the force of these works to Flanders, where he had spent 1925 to 1927 among the Flemish Expressionists, painters such as Constant Permeke. The Stedelijk holds several more of his Spakenburg subjects, among them Three Fishermen, Spakenburg, from 1933.