Louis Apol was famous for his winter scenes. He made his breakthrough at the age of 24 as a painter of winter landscapes at an exhibition of living masters in Amsterdam, where he had been exhibiting since he was 16. His winter landscapes were such a success and so lifelike that in the summer of 1880 he was invited to sail as a painter on the expedition of the ship Willem Barentsz to Spitsbergen. All the watercolours and drawings he made on this journey proved to be a great source of inspiration for the development of his further career. He painted a large panorama of Spitsbergen with a stuffed polar bear and a wooden house near Artis in Amsterdam.

For his forest and winter scenes he used photographs of snow and snow landscapes. These photographs that have been preserved were used a lot by him while painting, as evidenced by the many fingerprints in paint on them. The photographs helped him to paint snow in all its types in the right way. Blown snow, snow on a branch or a pole, cart tracks in the snow, all these types of snow are always painted to perfection.

The painting shown here shows a farmer with a horse who is driving a barge across the Vecht. Louis Apol's special ability to use subtle light and reflections to depict the various characteristics of different types of snow and ice, is displayed in abundance in this painting.

Literature:
P.A. Scheen, Honderd jaren Nederlandsche Schilder- en Teekenkunst, Den Haag, 1946, plaat 262