Row of Trees

A wall of poplars fills the left edge of this canvas, cropped so abruptly that we never see their tops. Everything else is flatness: a broad green meadow running to a low line of trees on the horizon, a few pale buildings barely bigger than specks, and a sky that shifts from warm cream near the ground to deeper blue overhead. The most interesting thing happening is the shadows, long bluish bands stretching across the grass from the unseen trees behind us, telling us the sun sits low and off to one side.

Valerius de Saedeleer was a Belgian painter connected to the artists' colony at Sint-Martens-Latem, near Ghent, where a loose circle of painters settled around 1900 looking for something simpler than city life. He admired Pieter Bruegel enormously and borrowed his high, wide viewpoint, though he stripped away the peasants and the anecdote, leaving just the land. When the First World War broke out he fled to Wales with his family and spent seven years painting the hills around Aberystwyth. Flat Flemish fields like this one were what he returned to, and he painted them again and again with the same patient, slightly decorative simplification.