#watercolour

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 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.