Snowy Landscape

Bare trunks rise like columns on either side of this snowfield, their branches meeting overhead in a tangle of dark lines against a grey sky. Between them the land opens out, flat and pale, with a windmill and a church spire marking the horizon. Look for the small details scattered across the middle distance: clipped hedges, a farmhouse roof, a lone bare tree standing in a field. Valerius de Saedeleer painted Flanders in winter again and again, and he treated snow less as weather than as a way of simplifying everything, stripping the countryside down to a few shapes and a narrow range of browns, creams and greys.

De Saedeleer (1867 to 1941) belonged to the first group of artists who settled in the village of Sint-Martens-Latem near Ghent around 1900, drawn there by cheap rents and the Lys river landscape. He was a devout Catholic with a deep admiration for Pieter Bruegel the Elder, whose sixteenth century winter scenes clearly shaped his sense of a high horizon and a world seen from a slight distance. Where Bruegel filled his snow with skaters and hunters, though, de Saedeleer emptied his out. When the First World War broke out he fled to Wales with his family and spent seven years painting the hills around Aberystwyth, though it was these Flemish winters that made his name.