#village

They say a small crowd of painters kept going back to the same Bavarian village around then — Kandinsky among them — daring each other to push the colours further every summer. This is what that dare looked like.

I couldn't find much on this one at all. From what I've read he's mostly remembered for cubism, and this seems to come from before any of that — a small early thing that survived. If anyone knows more, I'd love the story.

Apparently a mill-race is the channel that carries water to a mill wheel — I had to look that up. From what I've read he made his name painting working places like this, canals and quarries and construction, when everyone else wanted pretty ones.

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.

Wikipedia says he spent his summers in a small Bavarian town, painting it over and over and brighter each time — and a couple of years after this he gave up painting recognisable things altogether.