Théodore Verstraete (1850–1907)
La viellée (The Vigil), 1888

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

Jeffery Howe
Professor Emeritus, Art History

Verstraete studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, but he abandoned his academic training to paint directly from nature in the open air. Verstraete even built a mobile studio in order to paint landscapes on site. A founding member of dissident artist groups, Les XX in Brussels and the Cercle des XIII in Antwerp, he painted realist scenes of the rural poor. This darkly impressionistic landscape shows figures dressed in black trudging through the snow to keep vigil in a neighbor’s house. The delicate snowflakes contrast with the stolid figures in their dark clothing.

His fellow artist, Fernand Khnopff, writing in the Studio in 1897, suggested a spiritual dimension to these scenes of everyday life and the Belgian landscape: “Verstraete has treated landscape not from the colourist’s point of view alone. He has grasped and recorded the spirit of the soil in its subtlest aspects and in his most characteristic manner, and with all possible delicacy and intensity of feeling revealed the close connection between Man and the Earth he inhabits.”