The Belgian Connection: Léon de Smet
In the Garden (Au jardin (Madame De Smet et une amie), 1913
Oil on canvas
150 x 125 cm
©Belfius Art Collection, Brussels

Léon de Smet fills this painting with a tight pattern of small dots to capture a sunny afternoon. He avoids empty spaces on the surface, making the two women, the wooden bench, and the green background melt together. The shifting dots pull you straight into the scene, and what you eventually perceive brings you right into the heart of what pointillism wants to achieve.

Sun and Mud along the Lys

Sint-Martens-Latem was not just a quiet village; it was a battleground of styles. Artists swarmed this colony along the Lys river, just below Ghent, to escape city grime and clash over how to paint nature. On one side, painters like Valerius De Saedeleer trapped the landscape in dark, heavy silences. Léon de Smet chose the opposite camp, jumping straight into the bright, light-flooded world championed by Emile Claus. This 1913 painting marks his final summer in this creative hotspot before he packed his bags in November. He spots his wife Maria and a friend having tea on a bench, and turns a regular Sunday afternoon into an explosion of color.

While the Viennese crowd was tearing the human mind apart through dark psychology, De Smet looked for visual peace. He attacks the canvas with raw dots of yellow, pink, and violet. This quiet garden scene acts as a beautiful, tragic baseline. Just one year later, the outbreak of war shattered this colony and forced De Smet to flee to London.

Splitting the Light

The pointillist technique strips away the heavy weight of everything in the yard. De Smet uses the exact same brush rhythm for the white bench, the blue tablecloth, and the women’s dresses. They stop being separate objects and dissolve into the hedges.

This is where De Smet shows his true colors within the Belgian avant-garde. He breaks away from the hard borders of Gustav Klimt and the strict, cold math of early French pointillism. Instead, he softens the pigment, creating a warm texture that echoes the sensory richness of Théo van Rysselberghe’s the scarlet ribbon, 1906. This vibrating carpet of light links his pre-war experimentation directly to his wartime exile, setting the stage for later portraits like woman at the mirror, 1915.

Saved from Private Hands

Most of De Smet’s pointillist experiments vanished into private homes, locked away from public eyes for generations. This 1913 painting escaped that fate. It has a permanent home in the Belfius Bank collection in Brussels, keeping it visible for the public. By holding onto this massive canvas, the institution keeps a vital piece of the pre-war Latem school alive, right before the trauma of exile changed their style forever.