View of Tiegem in winter

Bare trees stand like pen strokes against a sky the color of old olive oil, their branches splitting into finer and finer lines until they almost disappear. Valerius de Saedeleer painted this view of Tiegem, the small village in West Flanders where he settled in 1908, and he gave more than half the canvas over to that heavy, brooding sky. Below it, the snow stretches out in pale bands, broken by a red-roofed farm on the left, a cluster of whitewashed buildings near the center, and a thin dark stream cutting through the drifts in the lower right corner.

De Saedeleer belonged to the artists who gathered at Sint-Martens-Latem in the early 1900s, a group that turned away from city life and city subjects in favor of the Flemish countryside. He was fascinated by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, whose sixteenth century winter scenes have the same wide horizons and spidery black trees, though Bruegel filled his with skaters and hunters while de Saedeleer emptied his almost completely. The result is a landscape that feels more designed than observed, with each tree placed exactly where the composition needs it. Worth noticing: the tiny row of bushes along the bottom edge, painted in flecks so fine they read as frost on a windowpane.