Dune Landscape in Moonlight

The small painting shows a very simple section of a landscape. Sandy dunes gently rise to the right; wind-blown trees stand on the crest. Under the boughs crouches a shabby cottage with a steep roof, cut off by the right edge of the painting. In the left middle ground we see a group of buildings, surrounded by thick bushes and trees; a church spire towers up from the centre. Between the trees and the buildings, the viewer’s gaze is drawn to the sea and the sky. The full moon rising above the horizon, painted as an impasto yellow disk in front of a dark abyss of clouds, sends its bright, gelid light across the surface of the water. It illuminates ragged sections of the sky and reflects off the wave-like crests of the dunes. In the distance, a sailing boat can be seen approaching the shore. The inclusion of anecdotal details creates a sense of a cosy, human shelter in a natural setting, although the figures are only roughly sketched. The mood of the picture is transported solely by the landscape and the light. The style is loose, with wide brushstrokes and the paint applied in splashes or rough stripes. The colours are alternately applied thinly or impasto on a white chalky background or a brown background. The white background shimmers through the sky and the water; all other colours such as the blue-green of trees or the reddish-yellow of the sand of the dunes appear deeper and are broken by the brown background.
In his short life, with only twelve active years, Adriaen Brouwer achieved considerable fame and renown for his small-format genre scenes with peasants or rural settings. Born in Oudenaarde in Flanders, the artist moved to the Dutch Republic. He was highly respected for his artistic skill and his keen observations of situations, characters and behaviour. Brouwer’s paintings of farmers and rural scenes continued the artistic tradition established by painters such as Jan Brueghel, Pieter Brueghel the Younger and David Vinckeboons, and it served the contemporary interest of city dwellers in a natural, rural lifestyle. In 1631/32, he left the Dutch Republic and returned to Flanders, where in 1638 he died in complete poverty in city of Antwerp.
Here, in the capital of the arts, he had attained the very highest respect from his colleague Rubens, who purchased a number of Brouwer’s paintings. There were 16 of Brouwer’s works in Rubens’ art collection, including “een Landschap bij Manschijn”, which could possibly be the painting described here. Brouwer’s reputation as the “peasant painter” was so firm that it was not until very much later that he was recognised as an influential landscape painter. He seldom signed his works and never dated them. We now know that the handful of landscapes that Brouwer painted, which are now greatly acclaimed for their intensity, were produced in his final years. Irene Geismeier | 200 Masterpieces of European Painting - Gemäldegalerie Berlin, 2019