Emile Claus

‘He is a Realist marching towards light’

Painted in 1892, Girls in the Fields is a dazzling example of Claus’s Luminist style. A group of girls, perhaps returning home from school, their clogs, or sabots in hand, and backlit by the golden light of a summer’s afternoon, process along the border of a field of ripe wheat. The expressions of the two leading girls are tenderly and naturalistically observed, while the effects of light and colour clearly show the influence of the French Impressionists, and particularly the work of Claude Monet whose work Claus had seen during his stay in Paris three years earlier, in 1889.
Breaking defiantly with the academic method of his teacher at the Antwerp Academy Nicaise de Keyser, Claus wrote 'Je ne sais pas, je ne veux pas peindre les Grecs et Romains' (‘I don’t know, but I don’t want to paint the Greeks and the Romans’), and after leaving the Academy began painting pictures of everyday peasant life, inspired by the French naturalist Jules Bastien Lepage. From 1883, he settled in Astene, on the banks of the Lys, in an old hunting pavilion which he later converted into his home, Zonneschijn. It was here that, at the encouragement of writer, poet, and champion of peasant life Camille Lemonnier, he began tempering his naturalism with a more colourful and luminous palette.

The present work belongs to the series of large-format paintings Claus embarked on in the 1890s of the peasant community of Flanders, depicting harvesters, communicants, fishermen, and haymakers. In many, the figures are backlit and cast long shadows, testament to Claus’s interest in the effects of light and shadow. However, the light coming from behind also served to heighten the subtle symbolism implicit in these paintings. The sun catching on the girls’ hair adds a quasi-holy aura to their already angelic expressions, making them truly God’s creatures. Like Jean-François and Jules Bastien-Lepage before him, Claus celebrated the honest, innocent, hard-working men, women and children of the local rural community, elevating them high above their humble station in life.