Woodland Scenery with Pond

Still water, a few birches leaning over the edge of it, and behind them the closed wall of the wood. The support is a wooden panel, upright, 28 by 34.5 centimetres, small enough to carry out to the spot and bring home the same afternoon. That was how Dutch landscape was increasingly being made in the third quarter of the 19th century. Painters stopped assembling views indoors and went to sit in front of them.

Bilders worked the woods and heath of Gelderland, in the east of the country, and the pools among the trees there gave him a motif he came back to again and again. The panel is not the property of the museum showing it. It belongs to the art collection of the Dutch state and is kept at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, catalogued as E126.