#construction

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.

It's said that he photographed sites like this and then rebuilt the scene back in the studio, so what looks grabbed in a single moment was actually pieced together afterward. He ran in the same circles as Van Gogh and, from what I've read, wanted to paint ordinary working people rather than grand subjects.