A Farm in a Valley

A ring of bare trees stands around a farmstead like a fence, their black branches scratched against the snow. Inside that circle sits a small cluster of buildings with rust-red roofs, a pond of greenish water, and a haystack or two. Everything else is white: hills rolling away in long smooth curves, a track disappearing over a rise, a pale disc of sun burning faintly through grey cloud. Down in the bottom left corner a single bird skims low over the snow, one of the few signs of life besides a tiny dark figure on the path.

Valerius de Saedeleer (1867 to 1941) was a Belgian painter and a member of the first Latem group, artists who settled in the village of Sint-Martens-Latem near Ghent looking for a simpler, more spiritual kind of landscape painting. His great hero was Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and the debt shows here in the high viewpoint and the snowbound valley seen from above. De Saedeleer painted winter again and again, partly because snow let him strip a scene down to flat shapes and bare lines, an approach that owes something to Japanese prints as well as to the old Flemish masters. During the First World War he fled to Wales, where the hills around Aberystwyth gave him new material, though he returned to Flanders and its frozen fields afterwards. The dark tangle of branches against all that emptiness is his signature move.