Warehouses on the Teertuinen on the Prinseneiland, Amsterdam 1880 - 1923

George Hendrik Breitner made this small painting of warehouses on the Teertuinen on the Prinseneiland in Amsterdam with oil on canvas. Look at those hazy, gray-green strokes capturing the buildings and their reflections in the water. You can almost feel the dampness in the air, the way he’s smeared the paint, like the city itself is a bit blurred and indistinct. I wonder if he stood in the cold, sketching the outlines first and then filling in the shadows and shapes. There is a wonderful tonal quality here that reminds me of Whistler, or maybe Corot—a kind of quietness and an interest in capturing the feeling of a place rather than just its appearance. I bet Breitner would have enjoyed seeing the work of later painters, like the German artist Gerhard Richter. He also explored the possibilities of blurry imagery, scraping the surface of the canvas and creating new atmospheric effects. Painters are always in conversation with one another, even across time, remixing and rethinking the same questions about light, surface, and seeing.