Humbert Beeckman de Vieusart – De Kempen, 1870

by Atelier Liesjes

A vast heathland stretches out beneath a sky that fills two-thirds of the picture. The landscape is brownish-purple and moss-green, with the occasional pale patch of water reflecting the light from the sky. In the distance, dark clumps of trees mark the edge of the plain, and a windmill stands out as a grey silhouette against the horizon; on the left, two cows graze in the wet grass. To the right of centre, a woman sits on a grass-covered bank. She wears a white bonnet and a dark dress with a red shawl draped over it, and there is a basket beside her. The paint is thin and translucent, as if water had been used. This is a watercolour in the tradition of nineteenth-century Belgian landscape watercolour: sparing with colour, generous with sky. The artist allows the paper itself to play a part; the ivory-white sheet shines through the paint, transforming into clouds and water. The brushwork is fluid, the horizon low, and it is precisely this that lends the empty expanse a sense of grandeur. The colours remain true to nature: grey-green, ochre, violet-brown and a cool blue in the distance. The atmosphere is that of a quiet, windy afternoon in the Kempen, where time passes slowly. Thus, a single sheet of paper manages to convey an entire landscape, from the damp patches in the grass to the distant horizons beyond the trees.
Humbert Beeckman de Vieusart worked as a watercolourist in the nineteenth century and favoured the open landscape of the Antwerp Kempen, with its heaths, fens and sheepfolds. He signed this sheet in the bottom right-hand corner and dated it 1870. His work follows the realistic tradition of Belgian landscape art, in which on-site observation was considered more important than a carefully crafted composition. A spacious, airy work for lovers of nineteenth-century heathland landscapes.