Guillaume VOGELS (1836–1896)

GUILLAUME VOGELS

1. Hiver or La Neige, c.1875 — Boulenger, Pantazis and the shared discovery of winter

Alongside his friends Hippolyte Boulenger and Pericles Pantazis, Vogels made winter one of the subjects through which a seemingly unassuming corner of the Belgian countryside could acquire extraordinary pictorial intensity. In Hiver, a few houses gathered around a descending road, bare trees and snow-covered fields beneath a heavy sky provide almost nothing in the way of conventional incident. The affinity with Boulenger is particularly close: the two men were intimate friends and equals, sharing the same search for motifs in and around Brussels, and Boulenger's own winter landscapes explore strikingly similar conjunctions of snow, buildings and bare vegetation—so much so that, without its signature, the present painting might easily be mistaken for his work. Its later history is equally revealing of Vogels' reputation: in 1924 it was acquired from the collection of Georges Weber by Jean Renard, the single most important collector of Vogels' work. Whatever thrill of discovery prompted the purchase, Hiver would soon find itself among the 82 works by the same artist recorded in the sale of his prestigious collection, organised almost exactly one year later at the Galerie Georges Giroux. No fewer than sixty of these were paintings, while the collection also contained twenty-one works by Pantazis. Yet already Vogels pushes this shared landscape language in a direction increasingly his own. What Boulenger had helped liberate in Belgian landscape would become the point from which Vogels departed.