#city

Amsterdam was throwing up entire new neighbourhoods around this time, and supposedly he was out in it constantly — he took hundreds of photographs of the city and worked from them indoors afterwards, which was not a normal way to paint back then.

According to Wikipedia he made a point of painting the shabby corners of the city — back streets, cheap lodgings, music halls — when that wasn't what anyone was buying. He mostly didn't stand out in the road to do it either; the accounts say he worked from small sketches and photographs once he was back indoors.

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.