The
myth about Dutch light started circulating in the 19th century.
In the 1850s, the Netherlands became popular with painters
and writers. Monet, Manet, Liebermann, Whistler, Boudin, Fromentin,
Mirbeau and the Goncourt brothers all came to see Holland’s
famous 17th-century paintings and the typical Dutch countryside
for themselves. And along with them came writers, painters
and photographers from America, Germany, France and Britain.
From their diaries and journals it seems almost as if the Dutch
countryside was discovered through 17th-century paintings,
as if the landscapes and the light were the inventions of artists.
The French writer Octave Mirbeau remarked that the ‘real Holland, the land
of water and sky… the pearl grey realm’ started at the confluence
of the country’s large rivers, about 10 kilometres north of Breda. The
German painter Max Liebermann wrote that ‘the mists that rise from the
water and shroud the world in a translucent veil give that country its extraordinarily
picturesque quality ... everything is bathed in light and air.’
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