Meadow near Oosterbeek, Gerard Bilders, 1860
During the summers in the 1860s, a group of painters gathered to work directly from nature in Oosterbeek, in the province of Gelderland. There, the Veluwe ridge of hills meets the low, broad valley of the Rhine. The generation of artists active before Bilders, the painters of the Romantic period, delighted in capturing that contrast. Bilders, however, singled out the ‘ordinary’ meadows in the forelands of the Rhine.