Joseph-Théodore Coosemans (1828–1904)
Paysage de Campagne (Landscape in the Countryside), 1866

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Gift of Charles Hack and the Hearn Family Trust

Jeffery Howe
Professor Emeritus, Art History

This dramatic landscape shows a more vigorous technique, suited to capturing a windy day. The diagonal row of trees serves as a windbreak, important in the lowlands of Belgium where strong winds often blow off the North Sea. In the distance at left, small figures pick up stacks of hay with a wagon, but the artist is clearly more interested in the light, shade, and wind that shapes the land. Two years after he painted this scene, Coosemans became a founding member of the Free Society of Fine Arts in Brussels, an independent avant-garde artist association dedicated to realism, and by 1876 he was cited as “the current leader of the School of Tervuren.”