Meadow Landscape with Cattle, Willem Roelofs (I), c. 1880
Unlike Romantic painters, Hague School artists had an eye for the beauty of the polder landscape. Instead of the dramatic and varied landscapes of the Romantic tradition, they painted cows ruminating tranquilly in verdant meadows with a panoramic horizon. These works were greatly appreciated and gave rise to the image of the Netherlands as a green, flat polder landscape under a greyish blue sky.