#hague-school

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.

From what I've read he was the youngest of three brothers who all painted — the other two went off to town views and stranger things, and he stuck with cows in wet fields for his entire life.

A zanderij is a sand pit — apparently whole stretches of dune were dug out by hand and carted off, for building sand and for flattening ground. They say the painters he ran with went in for exactly this: people doing hard work outdoors, put down fast and wet rather than tidied up afterwards.