A Winter Lanscape

That heavy olive-grey sky takes up nearly half the picture, pressing down on a valley where the snow has swallowed almost everything. A cluster of small houses with rust-red roofs huddles in the middle distance, connected to the rest of the world by a dark line of hedges and a track that curls off toward the horizon. A handful of bare trees stand in silhouette, their branches scratched against the pale ground like ink on paper. The Belgian painter Valerius De Saedeleer (1867-1941) built the whole scene out of broad, flattened bands of white and grey, giving it more the feel of a decorative panel than a window onto a real field.

De Saedeleer belonged to the artists who settled at Sint-Martens-Latem, a village on the river Leie that drew painters looking for simplicity and spiritual feeling in rural life. He was obsessed with Pieter Bruegel the Elder, particularly the snowy hunting scenes, and spent much of his career painting winter over and over, always with that same high viewpoint looking down across fields. When the First World War broke out he fled to Wales, where he lived near Aberystwyth for several years and found the bleak hills there suited his eye perfectly. His daughters later turned his designs into woven tapestries, which makes sense once you notice how neatly the shapes in a painting like this one would translate into thread.