Landscape with a Farmhouse

Marinus Boks 1849 - 1885

Summary

In this loosely painted work by the Dutch landscapist, Marinus Boks, a red-roofed farmhouse nestles among stunted, windblown trees and sandy hillocks. The impression is of a building being subsumed by the encroaching dunes. The view to the house is not along an ordered path, but up a restless cut in the steep sandy bank. An area of flat, arable land is visible to the left. Boks had been raised in an orphanage in The Hague, the Hospice Wallon on Zuid-Oost-Buitensingel (Oranjebuitensingel), then called Uilebomen. Although orphans were supposed to leave after they turned twenty-one, he was permitted to keep a small studio there. Vincent van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo, who used to visit Boks at his orphanage studio, reveal that Boks was troubled by bouts of insanity, which caused him to be admitted on more than one occasion to the asylum for the insane in The Hague. Boks was a pupil of Anton Mauve (1838-1888), who was one of the The Hague School of painters and a close friend of Willem Maris (1844-1910). Mauve took on Vincent Van Gogh as a workroom assistant from 1881-82, and it was presumably either at Mauve's studio or through his brother, Theo, that Van Gogh encountered Boks personally. We also know from Van Gogh's letters that Boks had sold for its metal value a silver medal that he had been awarded in England. Presumably his work was not selling well. He died at the age of 36.