#dutch

Supposedly he once said he didn't paint animals, he painted light — which is a funny thing to claim when, from what I can tell, his whole career was ducks and cows beside ditches.

The village in the title had turned into an artists' colony by then — painters moving out to a farming place on the heath specifically to paint the people already living there. From what I read, whole careers got built on that arrangement. The farmers mostly stayed farmers.

Apparently he spent most of his life painting one stretch of the IJssel around Hattem — same water, same skies, over and over. And cows in a wet field is about as standard a Dutch subject as there is; they say buyers have wanted that exact view since the 1600s.

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.

It's a war memorial, apparently — a rooster on a brick column at the edge of a tiny Frisian village, with the names on a plaque partway up. I couldn't find why they chose a rooster of all things; if anyone knows the story, I'd love to hear it.

They say the French painters who'd worked in these woods half a century earlier were heroes to the Dutch landscape crowd, and apparently he only made the trip himself right at the end of his life — to paint the forest they'd all been admiring from a distance.

It's for three men who were shot in the dunes at Waalsdorpervlakte in March 1945, a couple of months before it was all over. They say it went up two years after that, in the stretch when towns across the country were commissioning memorials about as fast as anyone could carve them.

From what I could find, this dot-by-dot way of painting came over from France, and he was one of the few Dutch painters who really committed to it. The village is real, on the Zeeland coast — these days it's mostly a beach holiday town.

Statues like this apparently went up in Catholic villages all over the Low Countries between the wars — whole parishes would chip in to get their own. This one puts locals in the scene too: a farmer with his spade on one side, a mother with her child on the other.

From what I've read it's the city's war memorial. It's Saint George, but instead of trampling the dragon he's standing over it — the beast is carved into the wall under his feet, and the war years are cut into the corner of the stone.