A painter from Ghent, Constant Montald received his training at the Academy of Fine Arts in his native city before continuing his studies in Paris. In 1886, he exhibited his first large-scale painting, The Human Struggle, at the Ghent Salon. That same year, Diagoras Carried in Triumph by His Sons, Victors at the Olympic Games earned him the Belgian Prix de Rome, enabling him to travel to Italy, where he stayed from 1887 to 1890. This journey proved revelatory. The splendour of the monumental decoration of St Mark’s in Venice, the visionary power of the Sistine Chapel, and the mystery of the frescoes at Pompeii held a profound fascination for the young artist. He became aware of his true vocation: the creation of a monumental art whose beauty might elevate the viewer’s spirit and embody a moral ideal.
From the 1890s onwards, Montald became increasingly associated with the Idealism championed by Jean Delville. Emerging from the intellectual climate of Symbolism, this movement extended the spiritualist and esoteric currents that permeated Belgium at the end of the century. Seeking to transcend the representation of the visible world in order to express universal values such as strength, grace and purity, Montald developed a visual language characterised by symmetrical, readily legible compositions, in which figures, often nude or idealised, are set within a lush, timeless natural world. In 1896, he took part in the First Salon of Idealist Art organised by Delville, alongside Victor Rousseau and Léon Frédéric. He subsequently produced several works, including The Ideal’s Barge and The Fountain of Inspiration, conceived for the main hall of the Brussels museum and now held at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium.
Around 1910, Montald had a villa-studio built at 270 chaussée de Roodebeek in Woluwe-Saint-Lambert, in eastern Brussels. It became a meeting place for his artistic and intellectual circle, frequented in particular by his close friend, the poet Émile Verhaeren, as well as by the writer Stefan Zweig and Queen Elisabeth. It was in this setting that the artist lived through the First World War. As the German occupation brought his monumental commissions to a halt, he turned towards easel painting on a more intimate scale. His subjects were now drawn from his immediate surroundings: gardens, houses and local inhabitants. This shift did not, however, represent a relinquishment of his artistic ambitions. On the contrary, Montald transposed reality into compositions of great formal rigour, in which balance, symmetry and chromatic harmony continued to shape an idealised vision of the world.
The present painting belongs to this period. Two semi-detached houses occupy the centre of the scene, with two small paths leading towards the viewer and inviting them to enter this peaceful world. Meticulously maintained, the houses stand out amid flourishing vegetation: blossoming trees, neatly mown lawns and orderly flowerbeds create a landscape in which human intervention appears to exist in perfect harmony with the rhythms of nature. Yet no human figures animate the scene. Their absence creates a suspended, almost unreal atmosphere, evoking an ideal of existence made more fragile and fleeting by the war. The same aspiration can be found in other landscapes painted during these years, notably in a springtime view of the blue house, as well as in snow-covered landscapes of almost identical dimensions.
Following the end of the Great War, Montald resumed his public activities. In 1925, an entire room of the Belgian pavilion at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris was devoted to his work. In 1929, the National Bank of Belgium commissioned him to design the new 10,000-franc banknote, whose decoration displays a rich vocabulary of allegory and symbols of prosperity. Alongside these activities, Montald taught at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels for thirty-six years, where his students included René Magritte, Paul Delvaux, Victor Servranckx and Anto Carte.
The present work thus bears witness to one of the most delicate phases in Montald’s artistic career, when the war threatened his livelihood without, however, undermining his moral principles. Faced with these circumstances, Montald displayed considerable resilience: far from constituting a mere withdrawal, his turn towards smaller formats reveals the enduring nature of his artistic vision. Behind the apparent simplicity of the subject lies a deeply poetic painting, capable of transforming a fragment of everyday life into a meditation on ideals of existence whose significance, transcending time, remains universal.
D.G.
