William Degouve de Nuncques

Anonymous sale, Campo & Campo, Antwerp, 20 October 2015, lot 38;

Private Collection, Brussels.

Possibly Brussels, Cercle Artistique, William Degouve de Nuncques, 1908, no. 26 (?).

Deliberately choosing productive isolation over a worldly life, Degouve de Nuncques followed an independent and original path among the Belgian artists who were his contemporaries; he is now regarded as one of the most significant artists representing Belgian and even European Symbolism. The extraordinary singularity of his vision and his seeming intransigence in applying his principles puts his oeuvre in a class by itself, surpassed only by Khnopff and Ensor.

Degouve’s art is marked by its simplicity and suggestive quality, prioritizing intuition and sensation over formal description and sometimes bordering on the meditative. In Festivities in the Parc de Tervuren, he plays on luminous blended harmonies of blue, grey and soft green, in which gradations of his chosen monochromes merge, enhanced by lamps, Chinese lanterns and strings of lights.

As was his usual practice, Degouve de Nuncques eliminates all human presence from his landscape, further accentuating the dreamlike quality of the scene. The lamps and lanterns hanging in the trees, echoed by the falling fireworks sparkling in the background, inevitably recall Whistler, whose influence on Degouve de Nuncques made itself felt in the last decade of the nineteenth century.

Festivities in the Parc de Tervuren was painted in 1906, a few years after the artist returned from a series of trips to Italy and Majorca, where the Mediterranean light certainly played a part in lightening his palette. In contrast to most of his works, Degouve de Nuncques here gives us a landscape which is certainly touched by mystery and poetry, but conveys a warmer and more joyful atmosphere and tonality than is found in his more sombre works.

Degouve de Nuncques depicted this same festival in the Parc de Tervuren, but this time at night, in a painting now in a private collection (no. 4.1906.003 in the catalogue raisonné of works by Degouve de Nuncques).