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Paul Gabriel is best known for his many typical Dutch landscape paintings showing the beauty, vastness and quiet of the typical Dutch polder landscape, its skies, its horizon, waterways, lines of pollards and windmills. He was acquainted with the Barbizon painters in Brittany.
His 1878 painting “Een wetering bij Abcoude” is in the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum collection. From this painting he also created this large etching. Quality works like this were known to have been bought or given as expensive marriage presents, cherished in the new family a life time.
His most famous work is probably the landscape with an approaching steam engine train along a “wetering” (Dutch polder Canal) titled “Il vient de loin” (he comes from far) painted around 1887 probably around the Hague. My great grandfather Martinus Ferdinand Ammermann (1859-1951) could very well have been the engine driver since he was stationed in Rotterdam at the time.
The original painting is kept in the Kröller-Möller Museum collections and was no doubt inspired by Turners revolutionary painting “Rain, steam and speed” painted in 1844.
gerbrandcaspers@icloud.com
