Willem Roelofs artwork • painting • for sale Waterlilies

A Dutch Monet! A rare work in Roelofs's oeuvre, known primarily for his Dutch landscapes. After moving to Brussels in 1847, he returned to the Netherlands every year to paint the polder landscape. He saw windmills and marshy meadows under heavy, cloudy skies, where cows grazed at the water's edge. But he also encountered the white water lily in the shallow ditches and ponds of the lowland peatlands around the Nieuwkoopse Plassen and near Loosdrecht. It usually plays a minor role in the background of his paintings. But in this remarkable work by Roelofs, the water lily takes center stage, as Monet would do a few decades later between 1914 and 1926 in his series of water lily paintings for the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris. Roelofs likely made a study of the lilies, as he often did during his explorations of nature. These studies served as a reminder for the development of a sketch in the studio and, according to him, had to contain 'the breath of nature'.