View of Lissewege

A woman in a dark dress stands in the middle of a sandy village road with a wooden wheelbarrow, a child beside her holding what looks like a basket. Behind them, low white houses with red roofs line the lane, and further left the tall brick tower of Lissewege's church rises above the trees. That tower is the giveaway: the Church of Our Lady in Lissewege, a small village near Bruges, has a famously blunt, unfinished top, cut short in the Middle Ages when the money ran out. Valerius de Saedeleer paints it half-hidden behind summer foliage, almost casually, as if it were simply part of the scenery rather than the main event.

De Saedeleer (1867-1941) was a Belgian painter who later became known for something very different: still, stylised winter landscapes with bare trees and snow, inspired by Pieter Bruegel and painted after he settled among the artists of Sint-Martens-Latem. This sunlit view belongs to his earlier years, when he worked closer to the Impressionist and Luminist painters around Emile Claus, building the scene from quick dabs of green, cream and pale blue. The loose, feathery treatment of the leaves and the scrubby grass at the right edge shows him more interested in light bouncing off a dusty road than in tidy detail.