New meanings and changing of artistic practice

The meaning of summer has changed a lot over the last 150 years. Where summer had previously been synonymous with the busy time of harvest, especially in rural areas, this changed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Urbanisation and the introduction of the eight-hour week transformed summer into a season of recreation. The exhibition reflects this shift, for example, in depictions of potato harvesters by Jan Toorop (1858-1928) and Hendrik Valk (1897-1986), or beachgoers by Gé-Karel van der Sterren (1969).

The exhibition also illustrates how the practice of painting has changed over the past century and a half. One particularly significant development was the nineteenth-century invention of the paint tube, which made it possible for artists to paint outdoors for the first time. Artists began to take advantage of summer to work in the open air, using the winter to develop work from their summer sketches. This can be seen in the work of Leiden's Impressionists, including Chris van der Windt (1877-1952) and Arend Jan van Driesten (1878-1969).