Scheveningen 1881

We visited the Mesdag Panorama today, just outside the center of the Hague. It is a huge painting on 1600 square meters of canvas depicting a 36o˚ view of the beach and the town of Scheveningen in 1881, as seen from the highest sand dune along the shore. Hendrik Willem Mesdag painted it in just four months in 1881(with the help of assistants).  Vincent van Gogh was one of many attending the opening.  

My image is a panorama from four shots, but it depicts only a small portion of the scene.  You climb a full flight of stairs to reach it, and it immediately simply takes your breath away.  It is utterly realistic.

It is accompanied through March 1  by New Horizons, a vivid exhibit of photographs of the North Sea by Bruno van den Elshout. He set up a computer-controlled camera on the roof of an hotel on the shore, which was programmed to take photographs of the sea every hour for the entire year 2012.  The show displays full-scale prints of some three dozen of the images, plus a large room full of a myriad of smaller images.  Altogether quite extraordinary, and a wonderful accompaniment to the huge panorama itself.

After lunch we paid a farewell visit to the Maurithuis , and then took a train south to near-by Rotterdam, where we are spending the night. Stay tuned.