Guillaume VAN STRYDONCK (1861–1937)

GUILLAUME VAN STRYDONCK — Prairie à Machelen, c. 1884–85

Prairie à Machelen belongs to the moment when an unassuming countryside on the immediate outskirts of Brussels became a laboratory for the young Belgian avant-garde. Van Strydonck had established himself at Machelen by the second half of 1883 and, at the inaugural exhibition of Les XX in 1884, already showed two landscapes painted there. That same year a critic described his ambitious submission to the Prix Godecharle, the triptych Tobie,as an “œuvre très importante, solidement établie, vigoureusement peinte”. Significantly, he praised the setting itself as “un paysage moderne, fort beau” and noted that Van Strydonck had taken his sites from the surroundings of Haeren and Machelen. Prairie à Machelen makes that modernity remarkably tangible. Across its unusually elongated format, meadow, haystack, trees and farm buildings are reduced to broad interlocking masses; dark trunks establish a structural rhythm, while the green foreground is spread and worked as colour almost before it becomes grass. Where Vogels, painting at Machelen during these same years, destabilised landscape through facture, Van Strydonck reconstructed it in paint. L’Art Moderne would later describe his increasingly physical handling with irresistible precision, writing that he amused himself by “beurrer ses toiles de tons éclatants” [buttering his canvases with brilliant colours], an image that perfectly evokes the action of his palette knife. Yet 1884 also marked a larger turning point. Van Strydonck and his friend Paul Du Bois, both founding members of the much-reviled Les XX, were simultaneously awarded the prestigious Prix Godecharle for painting and sculpture. L’Art Moderne celebrated the result as “une brillante victoire” for Les XX as a group. After the struggles of the preceding generation, modernity was no longer merely challenging the Belgian establishment from outside: the establishment itself had begun to reward it. Van Strydonck identified the painting on its reverse as Prairie à Machelen and later inscribed it to “mon ami Du Bois”. Long-time friends, Van Strydonck and Du Bois further strengthened their artistic ties in 1888, when they established an atelier libre for painting and sculpture in Brussels, where aspiring artists could work and learn under their guidance. The painting therefore does more than depict Machelen: painted during the earliest years of Les XX and eventually given by one Vingtiste to another, it survives as a remarkably intimate document of the friendships through which the Belgian avant-garde itself took shape.