Winter Landscape

When Koekkoek moved from the Netherlands to Cleves, just over the German border, in the summer of 1834, he explained that his homeland had no rocks, no waterfalls, no high mountains and no romantic valleys. This winter scene was painted in the years right after the move, between 1835 and 1838, and the Rijksmuseum cannot say which side of the border it shows. The rolling ground could be Gelderland or the German Lower Rhine. A snowy road runs past a thatched farmhouse, a cart heads off along an avenue of bare trees, and in the foreground men have stopped beside a sled loaded with firewood and vegetables. To the right, a misty plain opens toward the horizon. The painting came to Amsterdam with the collection of the banker Adriaan van der Hoop, left to the city in 1854.