Landscape in Guelders

Painted in 1873 and held at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, this landscape of the Guelders province in the eastern Netherlands by Paul Joseph Constantin Gabriël exemplifies the Hague School's sympathetic engagement with the flat, watery Dutch landscape. Gabriël was one of the leading Hague School painters who, influenced by the Barbizon School in France, sought to capture the atmospheric quality of Dutch light and the quiet grandeur of its flat, canal-crossed landscape. Guelders' wide skies and polder scenery offered him the vast horizontal vistas he favored.

Gabriël organizes the composition around the characteristic Hague School horizontal: a wide expanse of low landscape dominated by a sky of roughly twice the painting's land area. His brushwork is fluid and atmospheric, building the cloud-laden Dutch sky through overlapping strokes of cool gray and white that capture the province's characteristically diffuse, watery light.