Evening on Dam Square in Amsterdam

Amsterdam, grimy and crowded The city street is busy with servants hurriedly doing their last bits of shopping. A maid dressed in a brightblue uniform with white tulle cap is shown in the central foreground holding the hand of an expensively dressed little girl – possibly her employer’s daughter. The working-class woman to the right of her consists of just…

Amsterdam, grimy and crowded The city street is busy with servants hurriedly doing their last bits of shopping. A maid dressed in a brightblue uniform with white tulle cap is shown in the central foreground holding the hand of an expensively dressed little girl – possibly her employer’s daughter. The working-class woman to the right of her consists of just a few brushstrokes. Scruffy dogs chase each other while factory girls in grubby aprons are making their way home in the middle ground. Two tram horses, one black the other grey, with a red harness around their necks wait for passengers, while well-to-do ladies and gentlemen out for a stroll gaze at the fashionable window displays. George Hendrik Breitner painted evening scenes on Dam Square in Amsterdam several times from 1890 onwards. The canvas – strikingly large and horizontal in format – was not painted outdoors, unlike many French Impressionist cityscapes. The things that caught Breitner’s eye on the street were captured first in sketchbooks. He then worked up his many drawings in the studio, often referring to photographs. He was not interested in details but in the overall impression, the momentary snapshot. Dam Square is merely suggested, its forms barely elaborated: gloomy brown buildings, glittering orange shop windows, bright yellow streetlamps, and other-worldly tram cars. Having moved to Amsterdam in 1886, Breitner swiftly became one of the most important artists of his generation, known as the ‘Tachtig’ (‘eighty’, referring to the decade) painters or the ‘Dutch Impressionists’. The city was their muse and not always a cheery one. Breitner’s pursuit of real life in the metropolis was inspired by the naturalism of Emile Zola (1840–1902). Like the French novelist, he sought to convey the lives of working people in particular as faithfully as possible, without pity and with a loose and rough touch. He does that here through the contrast with the wealthy flâneurs.