Anna Boch

A female artist recognised within the Belgian avant-garde movements of the fin de siècle (Les XX, La Libre Esthétique), Anna Boch painted this view of dunes on the Belgian coast or in France. Born into a wealthy family (founders of the Boch Frères pottery), and having taken to painting en plein air from the late 1870s onwards, Boch produced many landscapes during her numerous travels. Whilst she occasionally brought her scenes to life with figures or animals, she often focused on ‘close-ups’ of natural elements – Breton cliffs battered by the waves, Mediterranean pines, and here, sun-drenched dunes punctuated by grasses that hold the sand in place, casting small patches of shade. Donated to the Musée d’Ixelles by her cousin Octave Maus, the driving force behind the XX and the Libre Esthétique, this painting has not been dated, but art historian Serge Goyens de Heusch places it around 1903. Dunes in the Sun demonstrates the extent to which Boch appropriated the achievements of Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism in a highly personal manner, two movements then widely prevalent within the avant-garde. To paint the sand dunes with their wind-sculpted contours, the artist opts for a variety of Impressionist brushstrokes, a succession of dashes and commas applied very freely in different directions. This dynamism contrasts with the calm sea and the strip of blue sky on the horizon, formed by the ‘calm’ and orderly succession of impasto strokes, which are closer to the rigour of Neo-Impressionism. A founding member of the Cercle Vie et Lumière in 1904, Anna Boch’s artistic exploration focused above all on the vibrant rendering of light – here, the sun’s radiance on a glorious summer’s day bathes the entire canvas. To achieve this effect, Boch draws on her palette and the chromatic theories at the heart of Neo-Impressionism: by combining complementary hues (golden-brown for the sand and mauve-blue for the shadows), the artist achieves maximum pictorial luminosity. 

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