スヘフェニンゲンの海の眺め

Van Gogh painted this on the beach in the middle of the weather it shows. In August 1882, early in his career and living near The Hague, he set his easel down on the shore at Scheveningen during a storm. The wind was strong enough, he wrote, to nearly knock him off his feet, and it kept flinging sand onto the wet paint. He scraped off what he could, but look closely and grains of that beach are still embedded in the surface, part of the picture now. It is one of only two seascapes to survive from his Dutch years. The painting has a second, harder history too. It was stolen from the Van Gogh Museum in 2002 and stayed missing for well over a decade, until Italian police recovered it in 2016 near Naples, hidden in the home of a Camorra crime figure.