A Fresh Vision: Landscape Painting in Belgium after Romanticism; The School of Tervuren in an International Context

September 2–December 7, 2025 | Daley Family Gallery

Click thumbnails to view selected objects in exhibition

A Fresh Vision celebrates a recent gift of thirty-six outstanding paintings from the School of Tervuren from Charles Hack and the Hearn Family Trust, a gift that establishes the McMullen as home to the leading collection of nineteenth-century Belgian landscape painting in North America. The exhibition explores the School of Tervuren, a group of Belgian artists who, in the second half of the nineteenth century, turned their gaze to the quiet forests and fields near Brussels. It examines how artists rejected academic convention and the growing spectacle of modern urban life to embrace the natural world as a source of truth, beauty, and renewal.

The exhibition also demonstrates how the Tervuren painters, including Theodore Fourmois, Hippolyte Boulenger, Joseph-Théodore Coosemans, and Théodore T’Scharner, were influenced by the French Barbizon painters to blend Romantic sensibility with realist technique, capturing the nuances of light, weather, and terrain in a modern, expressive style. Painting outdoors—enabled by the recent invention of paint tubes, and motivated by Romantic poetry and new scientific concepts of nature—they brought a fresh immediacy to landscape painting.

Though loosely defined, the School of Tervuren represents a vital chapter in the international evolution of modern landscape. Like their contemporaries in Barbizon and Giverny in France, Skagen in Denmark, and the Hudson River Valley of New York, these artists believed in portraying nature as they saw and felt it, in the moment. This exhibition places Belgian landscape painting in dialogue with wider European and American movements, inviting visitors to experience the power of place—and of painting—as a quiet yet radical form of resistance and renewal. Comparisons with selected works by Barbizon artists such as Charles-François Daubigny, and artists associated with the Hudson River School, like Albert Bierstadt and John Frederick Kensett, introduce international parallels.

Organized by the McMullen Museum, A Fresh Vision has been curated by Jeffery Howe. Major support has been provided by Boston College and the Patrons of the McMullen Museum.