Guillaume VOGELS (1836–1896)

GUILLAUME VOGELS

2. Effet de Neige, Hiver, c.1878–79 — the pochade

Snow became one of the subjects through which Vogels discovered just how little landscape painting needed to describe. Probably painted around 1878–79, this small, recently rediscovered canvas belongs convincingly among the pochades through which he worked directly before nature during these years. Its modest dimensions are significant: numerous works from this period share similarly portable formats, testimony to Vogels' determination to paint outdoors even under the least accommodating winter conditions. Here that immediacy remains materially visible. Beneath the snow lies a warm brown ground, allowed repeatedly to reappear between successive layers of literal brushstrokes: whites are dragged across it, darker accents laid over them, and the fence finally articulated through a handful of green-brown verticals and diagonals. The picture consequently allows us almost to reconstruct the sequence of its making. This method finds close parallels among Vogels' snow paintings of the later 1870s, including Enclos à Groenendael, neige, dated around 1879. Snow was ideally suited to such experimentation: suppressing detail and local colour, it allowed fence, earth and woodland to become increasingly autonomous marks. These intimate experiments laid the foundations for the snow landscapes for which Vogels would become celebrated. Weather no longer merely clothes the landscape; it becomes an accomplice in Vogels' transformation of nature into paint.