La chiusa

Dominique Lang came to Impressionism late and from the edges of it. He taught school in the Luxembourg town of Diekirch and painted around his lessons, and only after about 1909 did the light and the loosened brushwork start to matter to him more than the subject. He made this river and its weir in 1913, when that painterly manner was already old news in Paris but still fresh in a small country only just discovering it. Within a few years the world it belonged to was gone. Lang caught the influenza in the great pandemic and died in 1919, at 45, which is part of why his name stayed largely a Luxembourg one.