VAN GOGH IN DRENTHE
‘The sky was an inexpressibly delicate lilac white – not fleecy clouds, because they were more joined together and covered the whole sky, but tufts in tints more or less of lilac – grey – white – a single small rent through which the blue gleamed. Then on the horizon a sparkling red streak – beneath it the surprisingly dark expanse of brown heath, and a multitude of low roofs of small huts standing out against the glowing red streak.’
Vincent to Theo, Nieuw-Amsterdam, 3 October 1883The Drents Museum is proud to present the exhibition and accompanying book Travelling with Vincent – Van Gogh in Drenthe, the main event of ‘Van Gogh in Drenthe’ Year 2023.
Van Gogh – who does not know this artist who evolved from unacknowledged talent to internationally renowned artist who delights art lovers the world over with the sheer beauty of his paintings? Few people know, however, that as a young artist Van Gogh spent several months in Drenthe. In the early evening of 11 September 1883, the 30-year-old Van Gogh arrived at Hoogeveen station having travelled by train from The Hague, to embark on his Drenthe adventure. The weather was good, and the temperature was about 15 degrees as Vincent walked out of the standard station building in Hoogeveen, opened in 1870 and walked to his lodgings. From there, he would later travel on to Nieuw-Amsterdam/Veenoord, where he made his best-known Drenthe paintings, and also paid a visit to Zweeloo, where he drew the church.
As a former resident of Hoogeveen, I well remember the article that appeared in the Hoogeveensche Courant newspaper in late March, 1968 I believe, announcing that a painting by the famous artist had been discovered during the demolition of a house on Het Haagje. It would be displayed for all to see at the public reading room the following Wednesday. I went to see it of course, and like everyone else was hugely disappointed to find that it was an April fool’s joke – albeit a highly successful one.
This is not the first time that an exhibition about Van Gogh has been staged in Assen. In 1953 H. Clewits used his close contact with Stedelijk Museum director Willem Sandberg, who had grown up in Assen, to organise an exhibition on Vincent at ’t Zaaltje, an exhibition space in the offices of the Provinciale Drentsche en Asser Courant newspaper, less than two hundred metres from the Drents Museum. The museum now has two of Van Gogh’s Drenthe works in its collection. We acquired The peat barge in 1997, and in 2019 we acquired Peasant burning weeds together with the Van Gogh Museum.
And now we have this fantastic project about Van Gogh’s Drenthe period, which has received little attention from museums in the past. We are grateful to chief curator Annemiek Rens for her years of research which eventually culminated in this book and exhibition. I would also like to thank all the lenders who have made their works available for the exhibition, particularly the Van Gogh Museum and the Kröller-Müller Museum. Several organisations and funds supported the creation of this book, with a special mention of the Turing Foundation. It is being published in both Dutch and English by Marloes Waanders and the team at Waanders Publishers. Besides Annemiek Rens, Drents Museum curator Jan van Zijverden and Mark Goslinga of Drenthe Archives also contributed to the publication. Marline Bakker of Glamcult Studio produced the unique design, which is inspired by Van Gogh’s Drenthe palette and his travels round the province.
Harry Tupan General Director, Drents MuseumTravelling with Vincent
Jan Mankes and Annie Zernike arrived in Hoogeveen by train on 30 September 1915. They had married that morning, and planned to spend their week-long honeymoon trekking through Drenthe province in the northern Netherlands, following in Vincent van Gogh’s footsteps.1 Thirty years after Van Gogh had made the same journey, their pilgrimage took them to Hoogeveen, Nieuw-Amsterdam/Veenoord and Zweeloo, drawing inspiration from the landscape and the people there.2 Van Gogh had reinvented himself in Drenthe. Three months away from the art world had given him room to think about his art. The landscape had a calming effect, and inspired him to experiment with his subjects and technique. His time there would prove fundamental in his search for his destiny. This will have appealed to Zernike (the first female preacher in the Netherlands), and Mankes (‘Holland’s most tranquil painter’).
It was not so strange for Mankes and Zernike to be interested in Van Gogh’s work and life. Not only had there been several exhibitions about him in the preceding years, more importantly, his letters to his brother Theo had been published in 1914. Mankes was very impressed by Van Gogh’s life and work. He wrote to his patron Aloys Pauwels: ‘The spiritual is the essence of Vincent’s work, and the pictorial is subordinate to it.’3 Mankes was also in search of a certain spirituality in his work, and he too found it in nature and in country life. Although their painting styles were completely different (Van Gogh using an expressive impasto style, Mankes more controlled and refined) there are certain parallels, as in the painting Douwe with spade, where both the earthy palette and the male figure with a spade are reminiscent of Van Gogh’s early work in Drenthe and Nuenen. 1 The honeymooning couple used the correspondence and a Drenthe Almanac as their guide. 2
Unknown chapter
The fact that Mankes and Zernike chose to follow in Van Gogh’s footsteps in Drenthe is fairly remarkable. There were few practical obstacles to the trip. Mankes was born in Meppel and therefore knew Drenthe, and it was easily accessible from their home in De Knijpe, near Heerenveen. But the famous painter’s time in Drenthe was not the most obvious basis for a homage. The early literature on and reviews of Van Gogh referred mainly to his French period, and any reference to his time in the Netherlands was mainly limited to The Hague and Nuenen.
In 1937 Belgian art writer Walther Vanbeselaere published De Hollandsche periode in het werk van Vincent van Gogh, about Van Gogh’s Dutch period, the first book to devote more attention to his time in Drenthe. Vanbeselaere concluded: ‘Though the trip was eventually to end in failure, it did forge a more intimate bond between nature and himself. […] There, the firm foundations were laid that allowed him, in Nuenen, to evolve into a painter of peasant life, like Brueghel and Millet.’4
It was not until some twenty years later that anyone again focused on the work from Drenthe. To mark a Van Gogh exhibition at the V.O.R.K. building in Assen in 1953 De Ploeg artist Johan Dijkstra wrote a piece on his Drenthe period for the Nieuwsblad van het Noorden regional newspaper.5 Although the exhibition included only two Drenthe paintings (Cottages and Farm with stacks of peat) Dijkstra underlined the fact that no one had ‘experienced so profoundly, so strongly, the spirit of ancient Drenthe’. According to him, the Drenthe work acquired significance above all when it was viewed in relation to his French work. Van Gogh was still learning, after all, when he was in Drenthe. ‘Beside the Brabant work, the two beautiful little Drenthe landscapes are a revelation. […] how well Van Gogh captured the essence of nature, how deeply spiritual the subdued colours, how splendid the technique, the paint is like cloisonné enamel!’ He closed with a veritable ode: ‘As I left the building and drove home through the evening landscape of Drenthe, all of nature was Van Gogh – Van Gogh. The sun was setting and the evening sky cast its dying rays on the havanna-coloured autumn leaves – blood and gold. Dark farmhouses with haystacks and straw bales and velvet fields. I saw again the old Drenthe in all its poetic glory, as I looked through the eyes of Van Gogh!’
Travelling with Vincent
But it would not be until 1959 that the first real study of Van Gogh’s Drenthe period was published: Vincent van Gogh in Drenthe, written by Belgian researcher Mark Edo Tralbaut. This was also the first time that local sources had been consulted and eye witnesses interviewed. Tralbaut lamented the difficulty of this task, more than seventy years after the fact. He delegated it to Hendrik Clewits of Assen, who had been closely involved with the 1953 exhibition, and was very familiar with the subject. The book shed new light on the Drenthe period and placed the work and letters from there in a broader historical context.
Tralbaut described the ‘heavy, corporeal Drenthe works as a break with all that had gone before’.6 He rightly noted that this period had been somewhat overlooked. Even though works from the period had been exhibited, they were so few in number that they could easily be ‘crushed to death’ among the volume of work from The Hague and Nuenen.7 But, he continued ‘Despite their small number and their discrete format, they hold their own in an exhibition.’ He believed that the Drenthe work ‘stood entirely apart, and was not to be confused with what came immediately before or after.’
Yet for decades the Drenthe period remained what might be called the least known chapter in the life of Vincent van Gogh. It would sometimes be summarised in just a few sentences as a dark and very lonely period in which little of importance occurred. Or it was omitted entirely, giving the impression that Van Gogh moved straight from The Hague to Nuenen. There were of course exceptions, such as the exhibition catalogues Vincent van Gogh in His Dutch Years: Views of City and Country by Van Gogh and His Contemporaries 1870/1890 (1980) by Griselda Pollock and Jenny Reynaerts’ ‘On the Edge: Van Gogh’s Early Ideas on City and Countryside’ in Vincent van Gogh: Timeless Country – Modern City (2011), which considered Van Gogh’s vision of landscape, and also included his time in Drenthe.
Van Gogh was also considered, in the broader context of the many artists who travelled to the painter’s paradise of Drenthe in the nineteenth century, in the exhibition catalogues The Hague School in Drenthe (1997) and Barbizon of the North (2019), both at the Drents Museum. When The peat barge was purchased for the museum’s collection, Mechteld de Bois wrote Vincent van Gogh: De turfschuit (1999) to mark the occasion. The collection catalogues of the Van Gogh Museum and the Kröller-Müller Museum provided important information, too. Studies written from a historical perspective were also published: Vincent van Gogh’s Time in Drenthe by Wout Dijk en Meent van der Sluis (2001) was one of them. And of course there have been other publications that examined his Drenthe period briefly, or at greater length. This author has made grateful use of the sources available in compiling this study.
140 years later
Nevertheless, I believe a book is needed that looks at Van Gogh’s Drenthe period from an art-historical and contemporary perspective, a study that considers the significance of this work within his entire oeuvre. A publication that can serve as a reference work in the international Van Gogh discourse, but that is also interesting and accessible to a wider audience. This book aspires to be all these things. It is divided into several parts. Drents Museum curator of history Jan van Zijverden and photograph and film archive curator Mark Goslinga of Drenthe Archives describe the backdrop of Van Gogh’s trip. What kind of world did he encounter in Hoogeveen, Nieuw-Amsterdam/Veenoord and Zweeloo in 1883? What were the socioeconomic circumstances of the farmers and peat workers he painted, and what did the landscape look like?
The main section, Seeds in Drenthe Soil, devotes six chapters to a consideration of Van Gogh’s time in Drenthe from an art-historical perspective, including his reasons for visiting Drenthe, his sources of inspiration, the conditions he worked in and his experiments with subject and technique – and of course what his time in Drenthe meant to the overall story of Van Gogh’s life.
The fact that pictures can sometimes say more than words is reaffirmed once more in the picture essay that places Van Gogh’s Drenthe subjects in the context of his oeuvre. It becomes clear, for example, how he developed as an artist, and what role his time in Drenthe played in that process. We also trace Van Gogh’s travels in a timeline. Finally, the catalogue looks in more detail at all of the artist’s Drenthe works.8
This book is being published to accompany the first ever exhibition about Van Gogh in Drenthe, which has been organised by the Drents Museum. The show will open exactly 140 years after Van Gogh first set foot in Drenthe. It has taken ten years of research, during which more and more pieces of the puzzle fell into place, new insights were revealed and words were committed to paper.
Several people were instrumental to these many hours of effort. General director Harry Tupan believed in the project from the very first moment I told him of my dream. Our neighbours in Assen, Egbert Brink and Erwin de Leeuw of the Drenthe Archives, and Frank van der Velden of nature conservancy Het Drentse Landschap helped us research the locations where Van Gogh stayed and worked. These were discussed in a 2020 publication. Interns Rosanne Knol and Floor van Heuvel (later junior curator) went out to find sources. Fellow art historians Chris Stolwijk of the RKD – Netherlands Institute of Art History, Helewise Berger of the Noordbrabants Museum, Nienke Bakker, Louis van Tilborgh and Teio Meedendorp of the Van Gogh Museum, Lisette Pelsers and Renske Cohen Tervaert of the Kröller-Müller Museum and Ron Dirven of Van GoghHuis Zundert also contributed ideas to the project at various times.
I am deeply grateful to all these people, and to all the other people who have helped bring about this project, which means so much to me. As Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo a day before his departure: ‘Which was different last year, since in my view I’m now exactly at the point of Drenthe.’9
And so it’s time for the Drenthe adventure to begin.
Annemiek Rens
Travelling with Vincent
‘WHAT I FIND BEAUTIFUL IS EVERYWHERE HERE’
Vincent van Gogh must have been amazed when, at the age of sixteen, he went to work for his uncle in The Hague, and entered a world that was constantly in motion, both literally and figuratively.1 Horsedrawn trams rode back and forth, shop window displays seduced the public into buying the wares on offer, workers shuffled in and out of metalworking and furniture factories, and growing ranks of tourists flocked to the beach at nearby Scheveningen. Several years later, Van Gogh observed in a letter to his brother Theo that a new society was emerging, and that the old one was in decline.2 After living for a time in some of the metropolises of his day,
which included London, Paris and Brussels, towards the end of 1881 he returned to The Hague as a trainee artist. There, he took painting lessons with Anton Mauve, to whom he was related by marriage. At that time Van Gogh lived close to Rijnspoor station (now The Hague Central Station). He was fascinated by the rapidly growing city, the factories and above all by the workers, whom he drew and painted in all kinds of ways. But his fascination for life in the city occasionally turned into great concern. Van Gogh believed that the world was slowly going to rack and ruin, and people in the city were much too focused on their outward
appearance rather than their inner life. ‘Society is full of that, seeming instead of being.’3 This was one of the reasons why Van Gogh wanted to go to Drenthe, back to nature and to genuine people. On 21 August 1883, shortly before he left, he wrote to his brother Theo: ‘I would like to be alone with nature for once – without the city.’4 But what was Drenthe actually like in 1883?
A province with two sides
‘A land of heath, heath and yet more heath is how not merely a few imagine Drenthe, and of everything that is tedious and terrible, heath is for many the most tedious and most terrible.’ 1 These are the words of church minister Jacobus Craandijk (1834-1912) of Rotterdam, in his 1880 publication Wandelingen door Nederland (‘Walks in the Netherlands’).5 He did not, incidentally, subscribe to this view himself, as we shall see later.
The Drenthe that Vincent van Gogh visited in autumn 1883 was indeed a sparsely populated region. The majority of its inhabitants worked in farming and the peat industry. The entire population was approximately 122,000, only slightly more than that of The Hague, where Van Gogh had come from, which at the time had around 114,000 inhabitants. Drenthe did not have any cities. There were only two urban centres: the provincial capital Assen and the trading town of Meppel, each of which had a
population of just over 8000. 2 The two largest municipalities – Hoogeveen and Emmen – were in the south and southeast of the province. They each had just over 11,000 inhabitants, most of whom lived in the former peatlands surrounding the towns.
In terms of its geography, Drenthe is often likened to an upturned soup plate. It had high sandy grounds in the centre, and wet marshland and peatland around the edges, fed by a number of small meandering rivers. The higherlying parts, which were safe from flooding, had been used for farming for thousands of years. The ‘hunebedden’ (megalithic tombs) for which Drenthe was already famous in 1883 were grave monuments from a farming culture that existed over five thousand years ago. 3 There were many small farming villages on the sandy soils in the nineteenth century, each with a modest number of fields and meadows, alternating with expanses of heathland and the occasional stretch of woodland. For a long time the peatlands along the edges
of the province were barely used, until they were drained on a large scale in the seventeenth century and the peat extracted to use as fuel.
In 1883 Drenthe had a small, active cultural and economic elite. Assen had had a Provincial Museum of Antiquities (the current Drents Museum) since 1854 and the daily newspaper Provinciale Drentsche en Asser Courant was published there. Meppel and Hoogeveen also published their own newspapers. The Society for the Promotion of Agriculture in Drenthe, established in 1844, disseminated the latest scientific insights on arable and livestock farming. Leading members of Drenthe society attended national and international conferences and exhibitions on industry, trade, farming and science. And Drenthe entrepreneurs formed all kinds of partnerships and associations – some with investment from the west of the country – for land reclamation and infrastructural improvements. 4
The many new waterways in Drenthe were dug mainly for peat cutting. To
4
Canals were important for Drenthe’s economy. Construction of a new lock on the Drentse Hoofdvaart waterway near Dieverbrug in 1879.
allow the last big peatlands in southeast Drenthe to be exploited, canals were dug into the area from several directions. One of them was the Verlengde Hoogeveense Vaart. Since peat was Drenthe’s main export, and transport by boat was the most cost-efficient, the building of paved roads and railways in Drenthe did not proceed as quickly as elsewhere. Nevertheless, municipal authorities, water authorities and private individuals managed to lay some 300 kilometres of paved roads between 1850 and 1875. And 1870 saw the festive opening ceremony of the rail connection from Meppel to Groningen, which Van Gogh took to Hoogeveen. 5
The inhabitants of Drenthe regarded the improvements to their infrastructure as a great step forwards. When the provincial executive proposed in September 1883 that the grant for roadbuilding be increased from 40% to 50%, the Provinciale Drentsche en Asser Courant wrote: ‘Drenthe has progressed immensely in the last 50 to 60 years. […] Canals and improved roads have been
the conduits which, in combination with improved education and the growth in current affairs publications, brought light first to the main hubs in municipal areas, and then to the hamlets.’ The newspaper was of the view that economic progress in the province was also closely associated with the construction of new canals and roads.6
There were therefore two sides to Drenthe in 1883. Much still remained of the ‘old’ farming life that reminded Van Gogh of his childhood in Brabant. There was still lots of space: nature as we would now call it, or ‘untamed land’ as it was called then. There were still picturesque farming villages with thatched farmhouses hundreds of years old, and little medieval churches. At the same time, however, development was in full swing in Drenthe, just like in the rest of the Netherlands.
Van Gogh travelled from The Hague to Drenthe by train, changing in Utrecht and Zwolle. The final leg of the journey was on the new railway between Meppel and Hoogeveen, where he would stay for the first three weeks. The construction of the railway in 1870 had taken place at a turning point in the history of Hoogeveen.
Until that point, the development of Hoogeveen had been inextricably linked with peat production. In the seventeenth century, local nobleman Roelof van Echten started exploiting the peatlands around Hoogeveen, with the help of merchants in Noordand Zuid-Holland provinces and his wealthy Overijssel in-laws. For almost 150 years Hoogeveen was the most important peat producing area in Drenthe and, from 1750, in the whole of the Netherlands. Its population grew rapidly and in 1795 Hoogeveen was the most populous municipality
‘One long row of houses by the harbour’
in Drenthe, with over four thousand residents. Half of them lived near the intersection of waterways known as the ‘Kruis’ (Cross), while the rest were spread over the outlying areas. 6 The production of peat around Hoogeveen increased further after 1800, when the outlying peatlands were also taken into production.
By 1850, however, the end of peat production in and around Hoogeveen was in sight. When the railway to Hoogeveen was built, its peat industry was virtually a thing of the past. In 1876 the municipal council announced that ‘the time when the peateries will be entirely exhausted is approaching’.7
When Van Gogh arrived in Hoogeveen, the number of peat cutters had fallen from 540 in 1851 to around 80 or 90 in 1881.8 Many peat workers will have moved to other areas where the peatlands were being drained, while others combined working on the peat moors with a job in a small local factory, or digging up tree roots in the commercial woodlands around Hoogeveen.9 The
number of people with ‘long-term endowments’ also increased sharply for a time.10 Some peat workers started a smallholding on the former peateries around Hoogeveen, to supplement their income. There was lots of land where the peat had been dug out. But bringing in terp soil, urban compost or aquatic plants from the Frisian lakes area as fertiliser was too costly for larger farms to be established.11 Boatsmen and craftsmen therefore often had a small piece of land where they grew produce mainly for their own consumption. Such smallholders generally had no more than one and a half hectares of land, a cow for manure and a pig. They were not obliged to pay any leasehold charges for the first five or ten years.12
Given the high price of wood and bark, there were also peatery owners who planted pine or oak on former peatlands. The wood went to the mines in Belgium and Germany, and the bark to tanners in Noord-Brabant. In the meantime, the peatery owners hoped that forestry would create a rich humic layer so that
they could farm the land later.13
The advent of the peat industry in southeast Drenthe, however, meant that Hoogeveen retained an active involvement in the peat trade for many years, now mainly as a centre of transport. In 1875 as many as 8184 boats laden with peat passed the Kruis intersection.14 7 Most of the peat boats were captained by a skipper from Hoogeveen; in 1890 no fewer than five hundred boatsmen lived there.15 The peat boats were in operation during the time when Van Gogh was in Drenthe, as autumn was the season for transporting dried peat to buyers. Eight shipyards, four pulley makers, two sailmakers and three rope makers serviced the boat industry in Hoogeveen.16
After the decline of local peat cutting, some small industry developed in Hoogeveen. Enough cheap labour was available, and there was peat in abundance for use as fuel. When Van Gogh arrived in Hoogeveen there were two lime kilns, a brickworks and a peat litter factory there. The building of the
9
10
railway line brought new economic opportunities, and Hoogeveen became an important centre of the livestock trade in the Netherlands. The many beekeepers in the town also made grateful use of the train service, which allowed them to transport their hives to the rapeseed fields of Friesland and the west in the spring. Once back in Drenthe, they would release their bees onto the many plots of land where buckwheat was grown in and around Hoogeveen.
Compared with the sophistication of The Hague, with over a hundred thousand residents, Hoogeveen must have been an oasis of peace and calm for Van Gogh. The centre of Hoogeveen was home to around 4000 people at the time, some 1400 people lived on boats and another 6500 lived in the outlying areas.17 Most homes were situated in a ribbon development along both banks of the Hoogeveense Vaart waterway and beside the larger canals that ran more or less perpendicular to it. Or, as Van Gogh put it: ‘The village or town
here is mainly one long row of houses by the harbour’.18 All manner of small businesses were dotted among the residential houses. 8 In 1876 Hoogeveen had 37 bakeries, 31 tailors and dressmakers, 20 shoemakers and 14 house painters.19 In the centre there were all kinds of amenities like hotels, a town hall and court, a post office, several churches and a synagogue.
Transport to and from Hoogeveen was by train, horsedrawn barge or horse and cart. Despite the new infrastructure, in Van Gogh’s day many travellers in Drenthe still went by foot, using the many sandy paths in the province.
‘Breathe the fresh country air’
From Hoogeveen Van Gogh did not have to walk far to reach the heathland of which he had heard so much. The hamlets of Stuifzand and Zwartschaap were just a few kilometres to the north, and beyond them, the desolate heathland began. He had to cross a heath to
reach the little churchyard in Pesse, some four kilometres away.
The expanses of heathland for which Drenthe was known in 1883 had not always been there. For a long time, Drenthe had much more woodland. This gradually shrank during the Middle Ages due to the expansion of farmland and the use of wood for building material and fuel. The Drenthe woodlands were also negatively impacted by the Spanish, who used a lot of wood during the Eighty Years War to reinforce Coevorden, Groningen and Steenwijk. Finally, the demand for wood rose sharply in the seventeenth century due to the rapid growth of the Dutch economy, so the heathland was able to gradually expand. The farming community used the heath for various purposes. In a report on the situation in the municipality in 1883, for example, Zweelo municipal council listed under ‘Nature of the use of untamed land’: ‘Heath and moorland for fuel, feeding sheep and producing manure.’20 Heathland turf mixed with dung from the
stalls in which sheep spent the night, having roamed the heath in the day, was used to fertilise the fields. 9 Though there was some experimentation with artificial fertiliser, this miracle product was still too expensive for many.
During the course of the nineteenth century the bourgeoisie and farmers increasingly came to regard the heathland as ripe for the taking. The endless heathlands could generate more income if they were reclaimed and used for growing crops, keeping livestock and growing trees, fruit and vegetables. 10 In the mid-nineteenth century, common land ownership in farming villages –hitherto an obstacle to the establishment of private enterprises – was quickly abolished.21
Besides the idea that the heath should be reclaimed and exploited, it also began to be appreciated in itself during the time when Van Gogh was in Drenthe. The growth of urban centres and industry, with the crowding and pollution that went along with it, prompted a growing desire for access
to nature, particularly among the urban population. More and more doctors and scientists recommended a stay at the coast, in the woods or on the heath, for the healthy air. 11 Our current concept of ‘recreation’ stems from that time, from the belief that one could recover, ‘recreate’ oneself, in natural surroundings.
Nature came to be valued for itself. Frederik van Eeden senior used the term ‘natuurmonument’ (nature reserve) for the first time in 1880. He believed that we should not seek to cultivate everything in the Netherlands, but that areas of natural beauty should instead be preserved.22 The Drenthe heathland suddenly became famous for its beauty. Church minister Craandijk, who was quoted at the beginning of this essay, wrote of the Drenthe heath: ‘It does not conquer hearts, but wins them over nevertheless due to the influence of its simplicity and its majesty’.23 And agriculturalist Jan Meeuwes Schiphorst of Oosterboer near Meppel, wrote, in his 1882 poem
Op de heide (On the heath):
City dweller! Wilt thou look And enjoy? Make haste!
No, not to the dikes of Holland, No matter how pleasing the sea view. On the heath shouldst thou be, Breathe, with senses undivided The fresh country air!
I would wager it will be celebrated, praised, And thou shalt rest content
On the heathland’s couch! 24
A hut on the heath
While exploring the area around Hoogeveen Van Gogh regularly came across sod huts, both in the former peatlands to the south of Hoogeveen and on the sandy soils near Stuifzand and Zwartschaap. A sod hut was a simple dwelling that could be built quickly and with few materials. 12 The 18901892 Arbeidsenquête (Labour Survey): ‘The building material consists of a
few firs, plus sods of peat and heath; there is no floor, there is not always a chimney, though sometimes it takes the form of a wooden pipe; the sleeping facilities are dire, sometimes a single bed box for a man, his wife and several children; virtually no furniture. That a hut built in such a style is very low under the roof is in the nature of the matter […]. A few have a stone front and straw roof, another has wooden planking inside, against the sod walls.’25
The number of poor people in Dutch cities rose sharply in the early nineteenth century. Many people lived in dank basements and hovels. The old system of alms provided by the church was on the verge of collapse. General Johannes van den Bosch came up with a plan to move impoverished city dwellers to the ‘empty’ province of Drenthe, the idea being that they could fend for themselves there by reclaiming untamed land and becoming farmers. In 1818 he founded Frederiksoord in the southwest of the province, the first of the settlements for the poor known
as the ‘Koloniën van Weldadigheid’ (Colonies of Benevolence), run by the ‘Maatschappij van Weldadigheid’ (Benevolent Society).
Poverty was on the increase in rural provinces, too. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, more huts and shacks appeared. The grand houses belonging to the elite of Drenthe in Assen were surrounded in 1883 by sizeable settlements consisting of sod huts and caravans near Loon and on the Aardscheveld, an untamed area. The impoverished inhabitants kept body and soul together working as seasonal labourers on farms or in the peatlands, making and selling household items like brooms, working as street musicians, poaching etc. Some women made extra money by selling their bodies in Assen.26
The bourgeoisie were not keen on the sod huts. They thought the occupants uncivilised and potentially criminal. Some believed that they should all be sent to the penal colony for beggars and vagabonds in Veenhuizen. Strangely, at the same time a new,
romantic view of the sod hut emerged, the urban desire to ‘return to nature’ investing it with a certain attractive quality. Photographs, paintings and picture postcards presented a romantic image of the ‘hut on the heath’ in Drenthe as an almost idyllic way of living in harmony with nature. 13
Journey through a varied landscape
After a few weeks in Hoogeveen Vincent travelled on to eastern Drenthe, further into the peatlands. On Tuesday 2 October 1883 he boarded the horsedrawn barge to Nieuw-Amsterdam/Veenoord at the Kruis intersection. These vessels had a small mast to which the line would be attached, and generally had a crew of three: the skipper at the tiller, a deckhand at the mast and a boy to ride the horse. In 1883 there were three ferry services a day from Hoogeveen to Nieuw-Amsterdam/Veenoord and back. Skippers Van Dalen and Santing senior and his son transported cargo,