L.F.H. (LOUIS) APOL 1850 The Hague - 1936 The Hague A Dutch Town in Winter

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A fragment of a city, in the grip of winter. A rare townscape by the Hague School's specialist in snow. We look down a street lined with large detached houses and impressive trees. In the distance, a pedestrian and a carriage are visible. It is the trees, however, that dominate the painting. The pair in the foreground, bent double as they trudge through the snow, make plain how bitter the cold is. Winter scenes had already been a beloved genre within Dutch painting in the seventeenth century. In the first half of the nineteenth century, when painters readily drew on the art of the Golden Age, scenes of snow and ice once again became popular. Apol's teacher, the Romantic landscape painter J. F. Hoppenbrouwers, was known for his wintry landscapes with windmills, skaters, and sledges. Apol chose the same subject matter, but his winter landscapes are quite different. There is no winter merriment in his work. He emphasised the sensation of winter: the biting wind, the atmosphere of a cold winter's day. What interested him was the stillness of wintry nature; people play hardly any role in his work. He rendered that experience of snow and cold on canvas with a palette of an infinite number of shades of white and grey. Apol rarely dated his work, but his manner of painting grew progressively looser and more impressionistic. In the end, it was not the details that mattered, but the mood of the landscape.

Louis Apol began painting his atmospheric winter scenes at a young age and met with immediate success. He was the youngest painter ever to receive a royal subsidy and attracted attention at exhibitions. High prices were paid for his work, which was acquired by the royal household and the Rijksmuseum. Vincent van Gogh saw one of his paintings there and wrote: "Do you know that I often find things by Apol, for instance, white on white, very good indeed. (…) Truly, that thing is tremendously beautiful." The high point of Apol's career was his 1880 voyage to the island of Spitsbergen on a scientific expedition. On this journey, he made hundreds of drawings and watercolours of the polar region, enough to sustain his work for years to come. Until the end of his life, Apol continued to paint his much-sought polar landscapes, which were eagerly acquired at home and abroad. He even produced a panorama of Spitsbergen under the midnight sun, featuring mounted polar bears. Thousands of people came to see it.

Louis Apol belonged to the Hague School of painters, who ventured out to paint en plein air. They sought to put an end to the Romantic manner of looking at nature by approaching it as honestly as possible. What concerned them was the impression of light and atmosphere. The painter Gerard Bilders wrote: "I seek a tone that we call coloured grey — that is, all colours, however intense, brought together into a whole in such a way that they give the impression of a fragrant, warm grey." He and his colleagues most often sought that grey tone outside the city, where they painted the sky, the sea, or the expansive polder landscape. Apol found that tonality in the infinite gradations of white that snow-covered landscapes offered him. Fortunately, he lived in an age when winters still provided sufficient material for painting.