painting
Woman at the Window
Henry Van de Velde
About this work
Object details
- TitleWoman at the Window
- Date1889
- Mediumoil on canvas
- Measurements111,5 × 125,5 cm
- Inventory number2589
More about this work
Avant-garde in the countryside
Henry Van de Velde was and remains a world-famous architect and European pioneer of Modernism. As a young man, though, he initially studied painting at the academy in his native Antwerp (1881−83) and it was as a painter that he made his debut in the 1880s. Like many of his fellow townsmen at the time, the young artist was a regular visitor to the countryside, in his case the village of Wechelderzande in the nearby Kempen heathland. Van de Velde liked to stay there at the De Keizer inn where he could look out from a room on the ground floor, or at the seventeenth-century inn Den Hert which had a studio on the first floor. This is where he painted the canvas in which a woman in traditional Kempen costume is looking out over the village square. The view has not changed significantly in the meantime: there are more modern buildings these days, but the two lime trees still stand proudly in front of the old inn.
The French painter Georges Seurat had introduced the Pointillist method, also known as ‘Neo-Impressionism’, about two years earlier in Paris (see also p. 226, 228). Several Belgian avant-garde artists promptly began to experiment with the technique too, each in their own way. The principle was to apply unmixed colours in small dots, so that the final tones were not created on the canvas but in the eye and brain of the viewer.
Henry Van de Velde was the strictest of the Belgian Neo-Impressionists: he used coloured dots of the same size for this image, whereas his colleagues adjusted the size of the dots according to the nature of the depicted motifs. This automatically makes the overall work simpler and less detailed. The representation of space and suggestion of volumes were less important to Van de Velde than the abundant light and rudimentary formal language. We already detect hints in this painting of his later move towards the decorative arts, architecture and Modernism.
References
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