Theodore VERSTRAETE (1850–1907)

THÉODORE VERSTRAETE — Novembre, temps gris (Les Bouleaux), c. 1887

Few paintings embody Théodore Verstraete’s intensely personal conception of landscape as completely as Novembre, temps gris. A founding member of Les XX, Verstraete exhibited with the group in 1884 and 1885, but resigned after increasingly bitter criticism from within its circle, where his art was judged insufficiently radical. Yet independence was fundamental to his character. Reviewing his Antwerp exhibition in 1886, L’Art Moderne called him the only Antwerp landscape painter to have shown genuine “indépendance”: abandoning academic principles and the studio for “la vraie nature”, he settled at Brasschaat, where younger artists followed him and, according to the same critic, “on vit en petit ce qui se produisit autrefois à Tervueren.” Remarkably, that review also singled out as characteristic of Verstraete’s early work the “sous-bois maigres, aux troncs noyés dans la buée automnale, aux feuillages fauves et légers” which he liked to throw rapidly onto the canvas “à la pointe du couteau”—a description uncannily close to the present painting, which may conceivably have been among the works shown. Here pale birches emerge from autumnal mist, russet foliage breaks into rapid touches and a solitary figure is almost absorbed by the woodland. The artist’s own inscription on the reverse—Novembre, temps gris—reveals that his true subject was not the trees but a particular conjunction of season, weather and feeling. Pol de Mont would later call Verstraete’s art an “Impressionism of feeling rather than of representation”, recalling the painter’s conviction that nature became worth painting when its condition corresponded with that of his own soul. That exceptional receptiveness acquired a tragic resonance in 1895, when prolonged illness had forced Verstraete to abandon painting and had begun to affect what De Mont movingly described as his “uiterst teederen geest”—his exceptionally sensitive spirit. De Mont reproduced the present composition that year as De Berken, then in the collection of Dr Van de Wiele in Antwerp. In the revised edition of Verstraete’s biography, published in 1906, the critic and writer Lucien Solvay included the work as Les Bouleaux, recording it by then as part of his own collection. Verstraete’s original title nevertheless remains the most revealing. The birches provide the motif; the sensation of November is the painting.