landscape, light, art

The myth also inspired the emerging Hague School, the painters responsible for the rediscovery of landscapes and light and their revival in art. ‘Light and sky, the great magicians,’ Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch was to say. ‘We have to direct our gaze upwards.’ And Gabriël echoed him. ‘I don’t paint cows, I paint light.’ The Hague ‘painters of grey light’ are legendary. They took their easels to the seaside in Scheveningen, to the sand dunes and the polders. Weissenbruch and Roelofs fled from the bustle of The Hague and found what they were looking for in the swampy wasteland which is now a green zone in the centre of Holland’s western conurbation. Inspired by the landscape paintings of their 17th-century predecessors, they reinvented the genre and painted pictures of light. Take a work like The Village of Noorden near Nieuwkoop, which, in Jan Andriesse’s view, represents a crossroads in the history of painting: ‘You still see Vermeer on the left, but Mondriaan’s diamonds are starting to sparkle on the right’. What he was referring to was the continuity in painting, starting with Vermeer and culminating, via Weissenbruch, in Mondriaan’s abstract works. With light as the common denominator.