Great Hilly Landscape

A row of golden haystacks marches along the left edge like a line of small tents, each one capped with its own little peak, and the trees behind them are rounded into near-perfect domes. That tidiness is the giveaway: Valerius de Saedeleer (1867-1941) did not paint the Flemish countryside as a camera would see it. He simplified it, flattening fields into broad bands of green and yellow and letting the sky swallow more than half the canvas. Follow the land back past the hedgerows and you will find a village tucked into the middle distance, a church tower rising among the roofs, and then hill after hill fading into haze.

De Saedeleer belonged to the second generation of artists who gathered at Sint-Martens-Latem, near Ghent, a village that became Belgium's best-known artists' colony around 1900. He admired Pieter Bruegel the Elder above all, and you can see it in the high viewpoint and the way the countryside unrolls like a map. He spent the First World War as a refugee in Wales, then settled in the hills of the Flemish Ardennes, painting the same landscape over and over through the seasons. He is best remembered for his snow scenes, so this summer view, with its heavy grey-gold sky and deep green water in the valley, shows a warmer side of a painter usually associated with winter silence.