This catalogue contains all paintings and drawings acquired by the Van Gogh Museum from January to July Gerard Bilders was one of the first Dutch artists who, under the influence of the painters of the School of Barbizon, strove for greater realism and sobriety in their depictions of nature.
Thanks partly to the views expressed in his letters, which were published posthumously, he is now regarded as a pioneer of the Hague School. Most of the artists belonging to this group focused on the Dutch landscape. The greater part of the collection in the Museum Mesdag in The Hague, which is managed by the Van Gogh Museum, is devoted to the work of these French and Dutch landscapists.
The Mesdag collection houses two paintings by Gerard's father, Johannes Bilders , and his second wife, Maria Bilders-van Bosse Gerard, who died of tuberculosis at an early age, sold few paintings in his lifetime, and left only a modest oeuvre.
Nonetheless, his studio pieces and studies in oil all bear particularly effective witness to his ideas. Edge of the wood cannot be dated with any certainty, but was probably painted at the end of the s, when Bilders depicted a number of similar landscape motifs. Executed without embellishment, the work gives a realistic impression of a sunny day. Due to the loose brushstroke, the emphasis lies not so much on detail as on the nuances of colour and the illusion of sparkling sunlight, an effect that can be clearly observed in the rendering of the fence.
These two portraits by G. Breitner were donated to the Van Gogh Museum. Thanks to this double gift, in addition to two watercolours by Breitner, the museum now possesses two of his oils. The portraits show Breitner's younger nieces: A. Both were painted in around , when the sisters were roughly 8 and 12 years old. We see Breitner's characteristically loose brushstroke, a broad touch which often gives little scope to detail.
