Horse carriage in snowy city

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Daatselaar Fine Art & Antiques
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Description
This painting, by Louis Apol, captures the serene beauty of a snowy city scene featuring a horse-drawn carriage. The artist employs a soft, impressionistic style, utilizing delicate brushstrokes to render the snow-laden trees and hazy outlines of the urban background. The muted color palette of whites, grays, and soft browns evokes the chilly yet tranquil atmosphere of winter. The composition centers on the carriage, drawn by a pair of robust horses, which traverses a snow-blanketed street. Figures in the background are loosely defined, adding to the sense of motion and the bustling life of the city. The faint glow of a streetlamp provides a subtle focal point, breaking through the wintry haze. The scene feels timeless, inviting viewers to step into this quiet, snowy moment of 19th-century life.

Upon the death of the famous winter landscape artist Andreas Schelfhout (1787-1870), Apol was heralded by a critic as his promising successor at the age of only 21. Apol had his true breakthrough at the age of 24 at an exhibition of living masters in Amsterdam with the winter scene A January Evening in The Hague Forest. With this painting Apol made clear to all that he was indeed a marvelous painter of winter scenes, while also modernising this genre. Apol moved away from the anecdotal winter scenes from Schelfhout and painted the stillness of winter in a new colour palette. Nature and the ambience was the main subject and people were placed in the paintings only as staffage. In his works, Apol truly captured the ambiance of winter, the stillness, the solitude and the decaying nature.

His winter paintings were such a success and so real that he was invited to paint on the scientific expedition of the ship Willem Barendsz to Nova Zembla in the summer of 1880. All the watercolours and drawings he made on this journey were a great source of inspiration throughout his career. He painted a panorama of Nova Zembla with a stuffed polar bear and wooden huts near Artis, the Amsterdam zoo. This panorama was on view for many years and a great success.

For his forest scenes and other winter scenes he used photos of snow and snowy landscapes. His photos enabled him to paint snow in a very natural way in all its varieties. Drifts against the banks of a river, snow lying on a pole or on a branch or trampled snow on a path. Vincent van Gogh called the different shades of white Apol used “weergaasch mooi” “exceptional beautiful” (Veldink, p. 44).
Origin and period
Dutch private collection since 1985
Name
Horse carriage in snowy city
Categories
Fine Art Paintings
Origins
The Netherlands
Periods
19th Century Antique
Materials
Oil on canvas
Measurements
Height: 40 cm, Width: 50 cm
Reference
DAAA100662

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