page_title: Meadows near Rijswijk and the Schenkweg
section_title: Studio
hierarchical_section_title: Meadows near Rijswijk and the Schenkweg / At Schenkweg / Studio
caption_attribution_description: English: Vincent van Gogh - The Schenkweg (F-, JH93), sketch in letter 200, 1882, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
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 rented his studio at 136 Schenkweg, about 10 minutes walk from Mauve's studio at Uilebomen 198 (now the Boomsluiterskade). The studio was actually on a side street, called the Schenkstraat, off the Schenkweg. The Rijnspoor station lay about a quarter mile to the north-west. Today there are railway tracks coming up from the south into the station from Amsterdam, but these were laid much later in the 1970s when the Centraal station was constructed. In van Gogh's time the only tracks came into the station from the east from Utrecht, and he would have had an uninterrupted walk to Mauve.
  Van Gogh wrote that the studio faced "more or less" south. It follows that the view in Meadows near Rijswijk and the Schenkweg was from the back window facing north, which would indeed have been where van Gogh would have posed his models for preference, as artists prefer the light from the north because it is more constant.
  The studio cost 7 guilders a month to rent, and Mauve lent van Gogh 100 guilders to furnish it, insisting he had to have a bed. Van Gogh decorated the studio with his own studies, with prints from a complete set of The Graphic between 1870 and 1880 that he had acquired at a bargain price, and with flowers and a couple of boxes of bulbs. He declared himself happy and content with the result. Nevertheless, the accommodation was of the simplest kind. Arnold Pomerans remarked that it was the beginning of a long series of plainly furnished rooms, of which the Bedroom in Arles would eventually become a world-famous symbol.
  Van Gogh used his studio to draw from models, either directly at the studio or for finishing sketches he called "scratches" that he made on the street and in other locations, including especially the Geest, a working-class district in The Hague. In these expeditions he often accompanied his contemporary George Hendrik Breitner, although Breitner's subject was the city itself rather than the figure.
  Mauve had introduced van Gogh to the Pulchri Studio, The Hague's leading art society. As an associate member van Gogh had the right to draw from the figure two evenings a week, but he appears to have made scant use of this facility. Instead he relied on a stream of models he found in such places as soup kitchens and almshouses, spending on them a significant part of the allowance Theo sent him. Amongst these models were his mistress Sien Hoornik, model for Sorrow, and Adrianus Jacobus Zuyderland, model for At Eternity's Gate. His obsessive insistence on drawing from models brought him into conflict with both Mauve and his influential patron Hermanus Tersteeg, head of The Hague's branch of Goupil he had once worked for. Mauve visited the studio at the end of January, and his subsequent coolness towards van Gogh appears to have stemmed from that visit, made awkward by the unexpected arrival of one of van Gogh's models.
  Later that year, in July, in anticipation of marrying Sien, as well as wanting a bigger studio so that he could position himself further away from his models, he moved into more spacious accommodation next door at a rent of 12.50 guilders a month. That winter, Sien's mother moved in and van Gogh's relationship with Sien, never easy, sharply deteriorated. In September 1883, at his brother's urging, he left Sien for Drenthe, putting an end to what was to prove the only domestic relationship he ever enjoyed and for which he had yearned.
  Both his studios at Schenkweg can be seen in Houses at Schenkweg (below) in the block of houses extending to the right side of the drawing: "His first studio was in the somewhat higher building with the four doors and was on the left-hand side of the upper floor. His second apartment, into which he moved in July 1882, was on the upper floor to the left of the first one."  The whole area has since been extensively redeveloped. There is a commemorative plaque in the Hendrick Hamelstraat at 52.078441°N 4.329637°E: a children's playground lies directly opposite and further back the Hoftoren can be seen.
caption: Sketch of the view from his studio window in letter 200 (F-, JH930).[Letters 1]
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