Pakhuizen aan het water Uilenburg

Pakhuizen aan het water Uilenburg — Warehouses on the Water at Uilenburg — painted around 1900, depicts the Uilenburg area of Amsterdam — a former island in the Amstel that had been incorporated into the city and was by 1900 a dense working-class district with a large Jewish population. The warehouses at the water's edge were the physical evidence of Amsterdam's trading economy, their plain brick facades concealing goods in transit between the harbor and the markets. Witsen's Uilenburg subjects are among his most socially specific urban studies, locating him in a part of Amsterdam far from his own bourgeois milieu.

The warehouse facades present Witsen with large, relatively uniform surfaces punctuated by the regular rhythm of loading doors and windows — an architectural pattern he uses compositionally as a tonal grid. The water at the base of the buildings creates a fluid lower zone that contrasts with the rigid geometry of the facades.