Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh, known for his iconic canvas of a starry night sky, has an early work on display at the Currier Museum in Manchester. This work is more nautical in nature.
Kurt Sundstrom, curator at the Currier, has put together an exhibition that tells stories about life on the water.
The show, called "Stories of the Sea," features work by Andrew Wyeth, an American realist painter, and Georgia O'Keefe.
It includes the first outdoor painting by Van Gogh, "Beach at Scheveningen in Calm Weather" with gray skies and muted blues of the North Sea. It also depicts what could be fishermen’s wives greeting seamen docking their boats.
Sundstrom says Van Gogh’s painting documents the shift of a Dutch town in the late 1800s slowly transitioning from a fishing village to a tourist resort.
“The wealthy were coming to relax and have fun, but he was always a champion of peasants and a champion of the working class,” Sundstrom said. “So in many ways it’s kind of nostalgic.”
It’s one of Van Gogh’s first outdoor paintings. Sundstrom likens what he captured to what a coastal town like Gloucester, Mass. is experiencing, where a maritime village loses its small homes for storied buildings, housing apartments and commercial development.
The rest of the exhibit captures nuanced and various views of nautical life. Sundstrom said he wanted it to include the perspectives of women and people confronting colonialism, not just the view of working villages through the eyes of white men.
The exhibit will run throughout the summer till October.
