De dingen die aan de muur hangen in een hotelkamer
trekken altijd mijn aandacht.
Soms wordt je verrast met lokale kunst, heel vaak door kitsch.
Deze keer, in een hotel in São Filipe op Fogo leek het op kitsch
maar blijkt het om kunst met een grote ‘K’ re gaan.

Dit was het hotel in São Filipe, op Fogo. Geen idee wat de naam van het hotel was. Zoals je ziet was het hoteldeel achter het voorhuis smal om ruimte te maken voor het zwembad.

Dit landschap blijkt een schilderij te zijn van de Engelse schilder John Constable, de titel is Flatford Mill, ‘Scene on a Navigable River’, 1816 -1817.

Het schilderij is eigendom van Tate Britain, op hun website
vond ik de volgende tekst:

Constable began this picture, his largest exhibition canvas to be painted mainly outdoors, a few months before his marriage to Maria Bicknell.
He wrote to Maria from Bergholt on 12 September 1816: ‘I am now in the midst of a large picture here which I had contemplated for the next exhibition – it would have made my mind easy had it been forwarder – I cannot help it – we must not expect to have all our wishes complete’.
Prior to 1814, the artist produced his exhibition pictures in the studio, working from oil sketches and drawings, but in that year he declared his intention to make finished paintings from nature.
The summers of 1816 and 1817 were the last occasions upon which Constable spent any length of time at East Bergholt, and the last in which the artist painted directly from the scenery of his Suffolk childhood.

Constable frequently depicted the scenes of his ‘careless boyhood’ which, he wrote to his friend Archdeacon Fisher, he associated with ‘all that lies on the banks of the Stour.
They made me a painter (& I am gratefull)’.
The Constable family business was at Flatford, about a mile from East Bergholt.
The family had a watermill on the Stour for grinding corn, and a dry dock for building the barges to transport grain to Mistley for shipment to London, as well as a watermill upstream at Dedham.
The passage up and down the river required the use of horse-drawn barges; the ropes had to be disconnected in order to allow the barges to be poled under Flatford bridge.
In this picture, a boy is disconnecting a rope and another sits astride a tow-horse.
Constable painted the inscription to appear as if it had been scratched in the earth with a stick.