page_title: Meadows near Rijswijk and the Schenkweg
section_title: On the street
hierarchical_section_title: Meadows near Rijswijk and the Schenkweg / Other locations / On the street
context_page_description: Meadows near Rijswijk and the Schenkweg is a watercolor by the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh that he made in January 1882, shortly after taking up residence in The Hague.
  It shows the view from his studio window on the outer reaches of The Hague at the Schenkweg, then undergoing a period of urban development. The view is across the Schenkweg ditch towards the newly constructed Rijnspoor railway station, built for the Utrecht-Gouda-The Hague railway, and now the Den Haag Centraal railway station. Rijswijk was then a small rural community to the south, bordering Delft but stretching all the way to The Hague. The land on which the Rijnspoor was built was ceded to The Hague by Rijswijk. It is now a suburb of The Hague.
  The painting is amongst the very first paintings by van Gogh. Although he had been drawing for many years and occasionally applied watercolor washes, he did not take up painting proper until his study visit to his cousin-in-law and mentor Anton Mauve at The Hague in December 1881.
context_section_description: Van Gogh made many drawings he called "scratches", taken directly from life on the spot outdoors. Although these have a fresh spontaneous character, they were nevertheless carefully reworked in his studio with the aid of his models and perspective frame.
  He sought his subjects in the working-class district of the Geest and its adjoining markets. The Geest was a tightly packed district of narrow streets and courtyards on the west side of The Hague. At the Papestraat, on its eastern flank, it lay scarcely two hundred yards from Goupil's prestigious address at Plaats 20 in the center of the city. It was the district his mistress Sien Hoornik had come from. But the kind of courtyards, called hofjes, that Sien's mother lived in were nothing like the elegant little hofjes seen in Dutch cities today. They were little more than slums created by building warrens of tiny houses between and behind existing town houses to accommodate a rapidly expanding population, and they have long since disappeared.  Van Gogh described the area as the 'Whitechapel' of The Hague in a letter to his friend and mentor Anthon van Rappard. Breitner had his studio on its northern flank at no. 16 Juffrouw Idastraat at 52.078849°N 4.305106°E: the house still stands.
  
  The State Lottery office was situated in the Spuistraat a little to the south of the Geest district, the oldest and busiest shopping street in The Hague. This was where van Gogh's uncle Cent had originally opened his art store that eventually merged with Goupil. In October 1882, Van Gogh made a watercolor of a group of people queuing in front of the lottery (right) as part of his plan to produce a 'saleable' work before the end of the year. To this end he had elected to make studies of groups of people 'doing something or other', studies that had something 'nice and sociable about them'. He wrote of this painting:
  "You may remember Mooijman's state lottery office at the beginning of Spuistraat. I passed it one rainy morning when a throng of people were standing there waiting to get lottery tickets. For the most part they were old women and the sort of people of whom it's impossible to say what they do or how they live, but who evidently potter along and fret and get on with life. Of course, viewed superficially, a crowd of folk who evidently attach so much importance to "Today's draw" is something that almost makes you and me laugh, because we’re not in the least bit interested in the lottery.
  But the group of people — and their waiting expression — struck me, and it took on a larger, deeper meaning for me while I was working on it than in the first moment. It becomes more meaningful, I believe, if one thinks of it as "The Poor and Money". That, in fact, applies to nearly all figure groups: one occasionally has to think about them for a while before one understands what one is seeing. The curiosity and delusion about the lottery seem more or less childish to us, but it becomes serious when one thinks about the other side: misery and forlorn attempts by these poor souls to be saved, so they think, by buying a lottery ticket, paid for with pennies saved by going without food."
  In the same letter he also mentioned that he was working on a painting of a church pew that he had seen in a small church in the Geest where the almsmen went. This was probably the Bethlehemskerk, since demolished, in the Breedstraat, the 'church of the poor' behind Slijkeinde in the Geest where Sien's mother had her house. Attendance at the church was compulsory. The painting was Church Pew with Worshippers (above right), and several of his models of the time can be recognised in it. Hulsker remarks that the huddling of figures in State Lottery was certainly more successful than that in Church Pew, a subject apparently beyond him. Van Gogh went on to say that almsmen in that district were known as 'orphan men', and said he had taken on a bald, deaf, old orphan man with white sideboards as a model, providing a little scratch (left) of his bald head in his letter. This was Zuyderland (above left), who went on to feature in
caption: "... a splendid bald head, big ears and white sidewhiskers (n.b. deaf)."[Letters 39]
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