Meadows near Rijswijk and the Schenkweg is a watercolor by the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh that he made in January 1882, shortly after taking up residence in The Hague.
It shows the view from his studio window on the outer reaches of The Hague at the Schenkweg, then undergoing a period of urban development. The view is across the Schenkweg ditch towards the newly constructed Rijnspoor railway station, built for the Utrecht-Gouda-The Hague railway, and now the Den Haag Centraal railway station. Rijswijk was then a small rural community to the south, bordering Delft but stretching all the way to The Hague. The land on which the Rijnspoor was built was ceded to The Hague by Rijswijk. It is now a suburb of The Hague.
The painting is amongst the very first paintings by van Gogh. Although he had been drawing for many years and occasionally applied watercolor washes, he did not take up painting proper until his study visit to his cousin-in-law and mentor Anton Mauve at The Hague in December 1881.
Background
At the end of August 1881, van Gogh visited his cousin-in-law Anton Mauve, a noted and successful painter and a leading member of the Hague School, and showed him some studies and drawings he had made. Mauve encouraged him and suggested that he now start painting. At the end of the following November, van Gogh returned to the Hague for a month to take painting lessons from Mauve, during which time he saw him almost daily.
He returned to his family home in Etten at Christmas with the intention of setting up a studio there, but quarreled disastrously with his father, a pastor, over his refusal to attend church on Christmas Day. This, in turn, was a consequence of his bitterness over his spurned love for his widowed cousin Kee Vos Stricker that had led to so much family tension that year. He left home that same Christmas Day and returned to The Hague, resolved to set up his studio there.Naifeh and Smith (2011) pp. 249-52
At Schenkweg
The Schenkweg lay a little less than a mile to the east of the centre of The Hague. At that time it was open countryside, a polder reclaimed in medieval times, but the land was increasingly being sold for development. These new developments were cheaply constructed, and they attracted a less affluent class of people.Naifeh and Smith (2011) p.272-73 Today the urban conurbation extends a further three miles east, although there remains an extensive park and woodlands just north of the Schenkweg called the Haagse Bos, one of the last remaining stretches of ancient forest in the Netherlands, where van Gogh painted some early studies in August 1882.
Van Gogh was familiar with the meadows at Rijswijk. An aunt of his cousin Kee Vos Stricker lived at the Huis te Hoorn in Rijswijk, and van Gogh was a frequent guest of the family when he was working at the art dealership Goupil & Co., whose Hague branch his uncle Cent, Vincent van Gogh (a namesake), had helped found. On one such occasion he walked into Rijswijk with his brother Theo, probably to attend the 80th birthday party of his great-uncle Johannes Andricus Stricker. The walk seems to have cemented his relationship with his younger brother as he often subsequently referred to it in his letters. Evidently they discussed the possibility of becoming painters together. The family photo taken at the time (right) is said to include both Vincent and Theo, as well as their cousin Kee Vos Stricker and the Haanebeek sisters, Caroline and Annet, for which Vincent and Theo harboured unrequited youthful loves respectively.Cassee, Elly. "In Love: Vincent van Gogh's First True Love." Van Gogh Museum Journal, 1996, pp. 108-17.
Studio
Van Gogh rented his studio at 136 Schenkweg, about 10 minutes walk from Mauve's studio at Uilebomen 198 (now the Boomsluiterskade). The studio was actually on a side street, called the Schenkstraat, off the Schenkweg. The Rijnspoor station lay about a quarter mile to the north-west. Today there are railway tracks coming up from the south into the station from Amsterdam, but these were laid much later in the 1970s when the Centraal station was constructed. In van Gogh's time the only tracks came into the station from the east from Utrecht, and he would have had an uninterrupted walk to Mauve.
Van Gogh wrote that the studio faced "more or less" south. It follows that the view in Meadows near Rijswijk and the Schenkweg was from the back window facing north, which would indeed have been where van Gogh would have posed his models for preference, as artists prefer the light from the north because it is more constant.
The studio cost 7 guilders a month to rent, and Mauve lent van Gogh 100 guilders to furnish it, insisting he had to have a bed. Van Gogh decorated the studio with his own studies, with prints from a complete set of The Graphic between 1870 and 1880 that he had acquired at a bargain price, and with flowers and a couple of boxes of bulbs. He declared himself happy and content with the result. Nevertheless, the accommodation was of the simplest kind. Arnold Pomerans remarked that it was the beginning of a long series of plainly furnished rooms, of which the Bedroom in Arles would eventually become a world-famous symbol.Pomerans (2003) p. 128
Van Gogh used his studio to draw from models, either directly at the studio or for finishing sketches he called "scratches" that he made on the street and in other locations, including especially the Geest, a working-class district in The Hague. In these expeditions he often accompanied his contemporary George Hendrik Breitner, although Breitner's subject was the city itself rather than the figure.Naifeh and Smith (2011) pp. 262-63
Mauve had introduced van Gogh to the Pulchri Studio, The Hague's leading art society. As an associate member van Gogh had the right to draw from the figure two evenings a week, but he appears to have made scant use of this facility. Instead he relied on a stream of models he found in such places as soup kitchens and almshouses, spending on them a significant part of the allowance Theo sent him.Naifeh and Smith (2011) p. 274 Amongst these models were his mistress Sien Hoornik, model for Sorrow, and Adrianus Jacobus Zuyderland, model for At Eternity's Gate. His obsessive insistence on drawing from models brought him into conflict with both Mauve and his influential patron Hermanus Tersteeg, head of The Hague's branch of Goupil he had once worked for.Naifeh and Smith (2011) p. 272 ff.Pomerans (2003) pp. 138-43 Mauve visited the studio at the end of January, and his subsequent coolness towards van Gogh appears to have stemmed from that visit, made awkward by the unexpected arrival of one of van Gogh's models.Naifeh and Smith (2011) p. 257-58
Later that year, in July, in anticipation of marrying Sien, as well as wanting a bigger studio so that he could position himself further away from his models, he moved into more spacious accommodation next door at a rent of 12.50 guilders a month. That winter, Sien's mother moved in and van Gogh's relationship with Sien, never easy, sharply deteriorated. In September 1883, at his brother's urging, he left Sien for Drenthe, putting an end to what was to prove the only domestic relationship he ever enjoyed and for which he had yearned.
Both his studios at Schenkweg can be seen in Houses at Schenkweg (below) in the block of houses extending to the right side of the drawing: "His first studio was in the somewhat higher building with the four doors and was on the left-hand side of the upper floor. His second apartment, into which he moved in July 1882, was on the upper floor to the left of the first one."Hulsker (1980) p. 40 The whole area has since been extensively redeveloped. There is a commemorative plaque in the Hendrick Hamelstraat at : a children's playground lies directly opposite and further back the Hoftoren can be seen.
Perspective Frame
Van Gogh used a perspective frame to help him with his drawing. This is a device that had been used for centuries by such artists as Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer, and is still used today by artists and students in the form of simple cardboard cut-outs threaded with cotton. Many of his drawings show traces of squaring as a result of using this technique.
The versions used by van Gogh were elaborate affairs, however. The final version he had made for him at The Hague by a carpenter living next door had adjustable legs so that he could use it in rough terrain. He also used his perspective frame indoors to study his models, and one reason he moved to a larger studio next door was to make better use of his perspective frame.
Van Gogh called his perspective frame his "little window". Writing about Roofs Seen from the Artist's Attic Window (below), he wrote:
Van Gogh took his perspective frame with him to Arles, using it notably in Bridge at Arles.Naifeh and Smith (2011) p. 576 He dispensed with at Auvers, however.
Naifeh and Smith suggest that windows played an important role in van Gogh's life, as a way of gazing at the world without distraction, unobserved.Naifeh and Smith (2011) pp. 290-3
Gallery
The very fine study Tree Roots in a Sandy Ground ('Les racines') was renamed Les Racines by the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, identifying it with a drawing mentioned in a letter to Theo of 1 May 1882. In that letter, van Gogh said he wanted to express something of life's struggle, as also in a larger version (now lost) of Sorrow, his iconic nude study of Sien completed at the same time. Sorrow is cited by Jan Hulsker as an example of the technical proficiency van Gogh had attained in the six months since his first clumsy attempts at figure drawing in Etten the year before, and the same degree of mastery is evident in Tree Roots. Tree roots were also the subject of one of the last paintings (if not actually the last) van Gogh made before his death, presumed a suicide, in 1890. This was Tree Roots, although there is no evidence that he was similarly preoccupied with the theme of life's struggle at the time of its painting. The 1882 drawing Tree Roots was purchased by the Dordrecht art collector J. Hidde Nijland before 1895. Nijland's entire collection of 116 van Gogh drawings that he built up was purchased in 1928 by the Dutch shipping magnate Anton Kröller, husband of Helene Kröller-Müller, for 100,000 guilders, and became the nucleus of the collection at the Kröller-Müller Museum.Hulsker (1980) p. 42Eva Rovers - Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art Vol. 33, No. 4 (2007/2008), pp. 258-272
Rijnspoor and modernity
The Rijnspoor railway station was built in 1870. The railway line from Utrecht passed within a few hundred yards of van Gogh's front door and he must have been constantly aware of the trains passing to and fro. However, he seemed not to have sketched or painted them at this time, as he was to later in such works as Landscape with a Carriage and a Train (right).
Nevertheless, his artist's eye was not offended by modernity, and van Gogh regularly incorporated images of modernity into his drawings and paintings. He liked to sketch in the third-class waiting room at Rijnspoor as well as in the railway yards. In a letter to Theo written that October, he describes the scene at the yards:
He was equally lyrical describing Landscape with a Carriage and a Train in a letter to his sister Wil:
Gallery