Jacob Maris, 'A Drawbridge in a Dutch Town', about 1875

Both the bridge and our position in relation to it are very similar to an oil painting by Jacob Maris’s brother, Matthijs Maris, titled The Nieuwe Haarlemse Sluis on the Singel (also known as Souvenir d’Amsterdam) (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). Painted in 1871 while he was living in Paris, Matthijs’s picture was based upon a photograph he had bought in Amsterdam in 1860 that shows the Haarlem sluice on the Singel canal where it flows into Amsterdam’s waterfront. Matthjis Maris was not especially interested in his painting’s topographical accuracy and later conceded that he had invented some of the houses in the background.

It is the everyday quality of this simple functional structure that may have appealed to Jabob Maris, and he paints it without embellishment or narrative incident. He also made a watercolour, dated 1875, of the same view (Rijksmuseum), but in the oil painting he emphasises the monumentality of the bridge by increasing the distance between it and the row of houses on the right. As his brother Matthijs had done in his painting of the bridge, Jacob may well have changed the surrounding buildings – for example, by substantially reducing their height, perhaps to allow the bridge to stand out against the sky – and he also simplified the foreground. He replaced the watercolour’s single figure on the bridge with a horse and cart and slightly heightened the contrast between light and dark. As in the watercolour, Maris uses black outlines for the bridge itself. These appear to have been painted directly wet-in-wet without any preparatory underdrawing, although Maris may have used a ruler or perspective frame.

The painting makes an interesting comparison with Christen Købke’s more atmospheric The Northern Drawbridge to the Citadel in Copenhagen painted some 40 years earlier and with Van Gogh’s paintings and drawings of the Langlois Bridge in Arles. Van Gogh was in part attracted to the drawbridge over a canal, which he painted several times in oil in 1888, because it reminded him of his Dutch homeland. Indeed, it is possible that he may have even seen this painting. In a letter to his brother Theo, dated 6 April 1875, he mentions a picture by Jacob Maris exhibited at the 1874 Salon which is ‘almost the same’ as Matthijs’s painting of the drawbridge, which he had probably seen in London the previous year. Like the Maris brothers, Van Gogh was careful to show the structure of the bridge accurately, using a perspective frame that he had built while in The Hague in order to draw it correctly.