Meadow Landscape

George Hendrik Breitner's 'Meadow Landscape' (1901) is a pastoral subject that extended his practice beyond his characteristic Amsterdam subjects to the open Dutch agricultural landscape. The meadow landscape with its characteristic flat expanse, grazing animals, and the vast Dutch sky above offered a subject world quite different from his urban painting, and his engagement with it showed the breadth of his practice and his roots in the Dutch landscape tradition despite his primary identity as a city painter.

Breitner renders the meadow landscape with the broad handling and atmospheric directness that characterized his work in all subjects — the flat Dutch meadow under the characteristic Dutch sky depicted with the confident observation of a painter for whom the Dutch outdoor atmosphere was as familiar as the Amsterdam street. His handling of the spatial depth across the flat landscape and the quality of the sky creates the characteristic Dutch spatial grandeur.