Paul Joseph Constantin Gabriël Dutch, 1828-1903

Executed in the early 1880's

Paul Gabriël spent the largest part of his artistic career in Brussels (1860-1884). At that time the Belgian capital was an important centre of new and revolutionary ideas on landscape painting, stimulated by the realism of Courbet and the plein air painting of the Barbizon School. In our country, The Hague School incorporated these influences in a new style of landscape painting based on the direct observation of nature. 

Gabriël's stay in Brussels didn't prevent him from keeping close ties with his native country, returning to Holland almost every summer to work in the polders of Abcoude, Kortenhoef and Vreeland. The typical Dutch polderlandscape with its waterways, windmills and barges never ceased to fascinate him. It earned Gabriël the nickname 'portraitist of the polder'.

As Gabriël once declared, he regarded himself as a harmonist. He balanced a quest for atmospheric effects against a search for order and clarity, stressing the horizontal and diagonal lines of the composition. Simple subjects such as the present lot appealed the most to him. Gabriël's friend H.W. Mesdag noticed this well, writing about his work in 1904: 'However simple the subject, his graps of details enabled him to make his works interesting and to imbue many of them with that fine morning poetry that is so characteristic of Holland'.  Gabriël never ceased to stress the importance of conveying fleeting effects onto the canvas, writing to his pupil Gesina van Calcar in 1882: 'Above all, pay close attention to the tone of every passing moment, this will save you from becoming like a factory'.

Without neglecting the freshness and directness of his outdoor studies, Gabriël structured his compositions along prefixed lines, stressing the spatiality of the Dutch polder landscape. No wonder he is seen as one of the pioneers of modern Dutch landscape painting.