Longing for Egmond: Gari Melchers and George Hitchcock, Their Years in the Netherlands (Waanders, 2025)

Each month we choose a book connected to an artist, a place, or the wider world of American art history. Some are biographies. Some are field guides. Some are the very books that sat on an artist’s own desk. All of them are worth your time, and all of them will send you deeper into the stories these extraordinary places have to tell.

This month we’re reading Longing for Egmond by Marjan van Heteren, the story of two American painters who settled in a Dutch fishing village in 1884 and turned it into an international artists’ colony. One of them, Gari Melchers, later made his home at Belmont in Virginia, where his house and studio are open to visitors today.