The Wooden Bridge

Jacob Maris worked with the group of Dutch painters who settled around The Hague in the 1870s and took their subjects from the water meadows at the edge of town. Critics nicknamed them the Grey School, after the weather in their pictures. A wooden bridge over a canal was subject enough. This one comes with no date at all. The Dutch national collection that owns it records only the span of his working years, 1855 to 1899, because nothing more precise has survived for the canvas. The motif he returned to often. The white wooden bridge over the canal at Rijswijk stood close to his house, and the Rijksmuseum keeps an oil sketch he made on the spot there and later worked up into a larger painting. This version carries the state inventory number E875, and since 2014 it has been registered and shown at the Dordrechts Museum.