The End of a Gloomy Day

A wheat field takes up nearly half this canvas, and Valerius De Saedeleer paints it as a single sweep of dusty gold, broken only by the thin track curving along its edge. On the left, a stand of trees stands in shadow, their trunks pale and spindly against the grass. The sky does most of the work here: long horizontal bands of ochre and grey-green, thinned out near the horizon where a strip of cooler light suggests the sun has just dropped away. Nothing in the picture moves, and the one tree standing alone in the middle distance acts as a kind of marker, the only thing tall enough to interrupt the flat Flemish horizon.

De Saedeleer (1867 to 1941) belonged to the artists who settled in the village of Sint-Martens-Latem near Ghent around 1900, drawn there by cheap rent and open country. He was a deeply religious man who came to see landscape almost as devotional work, and he studied Pieter Bruegel the Elder closely, borrowing that old master's habit of laying out land in broad, simplified planes seen from slightly above. This painting sits early in that development, still tonal and murky rather than the crisp, snow-covered scenes he became known for later. When the First World War broke out he fled to Wales with his family and spent years painting the hills around Aberystwyth, which turns out to have suited him rather well.