Strand von Scheveningen bei stürmischen Wetter

Look closely and you may find real grains of sand in the paint: Van Gogh made this seascape on a storm-lashed beach, while the wind nearly knocked him off his feet.

The story behind the painting

In August 1882 Vincent van Gogh was still a beginner in oil paint. He had made his first paintings only in December 1881, under the guidance of Anton Mauve, the husband of his cousin Jet Carbentus, and this work belongs to his second attempt at painting that summer. On a stormy day, the 21st or 22nd of August, he set up his easel on the beach at Scheveningen, on the North Sea coast a few miles from The Hague, and painted quickly in the open air. The wind whipped up sand and almost blew him over. He later scraped most of the sand from the thick wet paint, but not all of it. Afterwards the canvas was stored at the family house in Breda, and when the family moved in 1886 it was left behind in the attic.

What to look for

The picture is built in three horizontal bands. At the top is a threatening grey sky with dark, rolling clouds. In the middle lies a greenish-grey sea, with lines of white-capped waves breaking toward the shore. At the bottom stretch the beach and dunes in browns, oranges, yellows and greens. Now find the people. Some are fishwives in white bonnets, watching as men with horses and a cart prepare to haul on a rope tied to a waiting fishing boat, to bring it safely ashore. Notice how little paint each figure needs: a few economical strokes suggest a whole person. The breakers are different, laid on as thick lines squeezed straight from the tube. And if you are ever close to the canvas, remember the sand still caught in its surface.

Meaning and intent

The painting is described as an Impressionist take on the grey-toned seascapes of the Hague School, such as Hendrik Mesdag's 1881 Panorama of Scheveningen. Where those works offer a broad, carefully finished view, Van Gogh's is rapid, rough and physical, closer to the experience of standing in the gale. The subject is work and weather rather than leisure: a community gathering to bring a boat home through heavy surf. For a young artist only months into painting, the canvas was also a test of nerve, an attempt to catch a moving sea and a busy beach in a single session outdoors. The sand in the paint turns that struggle into something you can almost touch, a record of the conditions as much as of the scene.

Legacy

Few paintings have travelled a stranger road. Abandoned in the Breda attic, it passed to a carpenter, Adrianus Schrauwen, and in 1902 went to the merchant J.C. Couvreur in a job lot dismissed as rubbish. It then reached a Rotterdam gallery, was bought in 1903 by Gerlach Ribbius Peletier, and was later donated to the Dutch state by his daughter Liesbeth in 1989. The Van Gogh Museum held it from then on, until thieves took it, together with Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen, on 7 December 2002. After more than thirteen years it was found in January 2016 by the Italian Guardia di Finanza, under the kitchen floor of a villa at Castellammare di Stabia near Naples. Restored, it went back on display in March 2017.

Schon gewusst?

Grains of sand blown onto the wet paint are still embedded in the canvas.
It was painted on 21 or 22 August 1882, only months after Van Gogh's first paintings.
Sources disagree slightly on size: Wikidata gives 36.4 by 51.9 cm, Wikipedia 34.5 by 51 cm.
Stolen in 2002, it was recovered near Naples in 2016 and returned to view in 2017.

Wikipedia · Wikidata