Heaven Weeping upon the Rubble
Artist / maker
Jakob Smits (painter)Period
20th centuryCollection
Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp
Jakob Smits of Rotterdam, who became a naturalised Belgian citizen, settled in the picturesque hamlet of Achterbos in the province of Utrecht in 1888. Around 1900 he began making large oil paintings that mainly immortalised the spiritual nobility of peasant life. In the beauty of the Campine landscape Smits found a subject in which the idyll and tranquillity of country…
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Jakob Smits of Rotterdam, who became a naturalised Belgian citizen, settled in the picturesque hamlet of Achterbos in the province of Utrecht in 1888. Around 1900 he began making large oil paintings that mainly immortalised the spiritual nobility of peasant life. In the beauty of the Campine landscape Smits found a subject in which the idyll and tranquillity of country and family life fused with a form of religious symbolism and spirituality. In 1901 the critic Camille Lemonnier said of Smits’s art: ‘it is human, tender, subdued: it has the beauty of the spiritualised life. Imbued with life, it is honest, deep, serious painting.... I am always deeply moved when I look at his works. They establish a close and lasting bond between me and the dreamed souls that they depict’.
Heaven weeping upon the rubble is a post-war painting in which a dominant white sky resembles a curtain of rays: as if a divine light both shines down and weeps at the rubble of war, at the shattered trees and crosses, and at the peasant cottages still standing to symbolise the insignificance of human existence. The painting, and the vast expanse of sky in particular, is in a technique in which the oil paint is applied in thick, lard-like layers. Those impasted passages have a granular structure which imparts a vibrating and brilliant radiance to the colours. ‘Each phase [paint layer] ripens, gives a richer gleam and intensifies everything,’ Smits wrote. Thus this ‘painter of light’ surpasses a natural depiction of light to express a symbolic light, a light as material, ‘the obvious witness of the mystery of life,’ as he described it himself.
Smits preferred to work in semi-darkness by covering most of the windows of his studio with planks. On top of that, the light that did enter through the other two windows was then filtered through ‘several screens of transparent paper,’ according to the poet Jan Van Nijlen, who visited the painter. In other words, Smits went to great lengths to get the natural light falling as indirectly on his canvas as possible. In that way he tried to express his characteristic unreal light pictorially. Van Nijlen observed: ‘The painter who created such beautiful landscapes with luminous evening skies, with houses whose walls sparkled with an uncommon and pure white, was no friend of sunlight’.
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