Hippoliet Van Heesvelde – Summer, 1932

by Atelier Liesjes

A summer landscape, painted as if the paint itself had become the landscape. The sky takes up almost half the canvas: a sky of off-white, pearl grey and cream, built up from short, curling strokes that overlap like scales. Beneath this runs a dark band of trees and bushes, with leaves applied to the canvas in thick blobs of green, olive green and yellow-green. In the foreground lies a meadow; the grass is not painted but modelled, with upright strokes in yellow-green and ochre, so that it appears to be blowing in the wind. To the left of centre stand two small figures in dark clothing, almost inconspicuous amidst all that greenery; a red accent places them in the light.
Van Heesvelde worked with a brush and a palette knife, leaving the paint thick on the canvas. This impasto gives the work an almost tangible surface texture: you can see the movement of the hand, the speed of the painting, the desire to capture the sun and the warmth of a Flemish summer’s day without seeking to analyse them. The style balances between Impressionism and Expressionism: the colours are true to life, but the brushwork is vigorous and idiosyncratic. The colours are those of a summer’s day in the Flemish countryside: chalk white, cream, sap green, ochre yellow and moss green, with a cool grey-blue here and there. The theme is summer itself, the heat hanging over the land and the buzzing of the grass. The feeling the work evokes is one of warmth, vitality and a certain restlessness – a landscape that is never quite still.
Hippoliet Van Heesvelde (1904–1945) was a Belgian painter who captured landscapes and farmyards in a powerful, textural style. A work by him entitled ‘ 'Zomer' ’ (1932) is held at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp. A distinctive, richly textured work for lovers of modernist landscapes and Flemish painting.