Chutes Over Holland

Market Garden opened in broad daylight. At around 1:00 on the afternoon of Sunday, 17 September 1944, the first of more than 1,500 transports and gliders came over the drop zones in the Netherlands, and the sky filled with silk. The 101st Airborne came down around Son and Veghel, the 82nd near Grave and Groesbeek, the British 1st Airborne outside Arnhem.

Roughly 20,000 men landed that afternoon, the largest airborne operation ever mounted to that point. The drops were tight and opposition on the zones was light. Dutch civilians stood in the fields and watched the paratroopers come down.

The 101st had its first bridge within hours. The one that mattered, at Arnhem, was sixty miles up the road.

The canvas is almost all sky. Canopies hang at every scale — one big enough to fill the top left corner, dozens more shrinking away toward the C-47s crossing high overhead. The nearest trooper dangles beneath his risers with his boots together, looking down. The brushwork on the clouds is broken and bright, like a spring afternoon. Along the bottom edge, a few small figures on the ground crane their necks. The viewer is looking up with them.