#canal

He only went to Venice once, apparently, and finished most of the paintings from that trip back home afterwards, working from memory.

A ropewalk is just a very long straight lane — apparently the rope has to be stretched out full length before it can be twisted, so the workshop ends up being the length of the rope. He spent summers over in Holland for years, painting the same small trades again and again.

The Dutch painters of this moment get filed under Amsterdam Impressionism, which sounds a lot sunnier than what they actually put on canvas: sleet, back canals, half-built streets. They say the point was the city on an ordinary bad day rather than the postcard version.