Willem Maris: Landscape with cows (end of the 19th century)

Willem Maris (1844-1910) didn’t paint cows, but light. These poetic words were his own and his work proves it. The beauty of nature, the laid-back atmosphere of a summer’s day, and the essence of the Dutch landscape; this painting has got it all. The superb choice of colors and the fine balance between areas with little or nothing going on and those with lots of details make the scene almost tangible, in spite of the rather rough brushstrokes. Vincent van Gogh was impressed, too: “A painting by Mauve, Maris, or Israels, expresses more, and more clearly, than does nature itself.”