Jakob Smits, The Kempen Landscape

by Atelier Liesjes

The sky is the main subject here. From the bottom left to the top right, heavy banks of cloud drift across the canvas, grey and pearly white with a faint blue undertone, and only right at the very bottom, at one-fifth of the height, does the land come into view: a plain of yellow-green grass and pale brown earth. On the right stands a whitewashed farmhouse with a red-tiled roof amongst low trees; on the left, in the distance, another farmhouse with a red roof looms. In the foreground on the left is a wooden cart, piled high with yellow hay, with a brown horse in front of it, waiting with its head hanging low. Two figures are standing by the cart: one in a blue smock, hunched against the wind, and a dark figure beside him. Further to the right, a third, small figure stands by a post in the field. The sand in the foreground is rendered with short, scratchy strokes in cream, ochre and grey. Here, Smits captures the vastness of the Kempen: not an idyll, but a region where the sky is always larger than the land. The composition draws on that sense of vastness and on the low, almost casual placement of the figures, who are not posing but going about their work. The brushwork is loose and fleeting, the colours are muted, and the atmosphere is that of a day when the weather could still take a turn for the worse. Realism and Impressionism converge in the way the light on the field is captured. Jakob Smits (Rotterdam 1855 – Mol 1928) was originally from Rotterdam, worked for years in Brussels and moved to the Kempen in 1888, where he built a studio in Mol and inspired the Mol School. He painted farmers, landscapes and, later, Symbolist scenes, always in the same subdued colour palette. A spacious, tranquil work that gives a room a sense of breathing space.