Environs of Antwerp, Sunday Afternoon

Florent Crabeels embarked on his career with kermis (Dutch for carnival scenes), which herald the painting presented here. He decided to paint daily life and its anecdotal side, using village festivities and gatherings as a pretext for increasing the number of figures in his work and for animating the composition. His painstaking concern for detail illustrates the subtlety of his observations on the bourgeois society of his time. He would subsequently develop a distinctive style of landscape painting that was focused on the De Kempen region and blended Realism and Impressionism, modern qualities already evident in the painting’s theme. Bequeathed in 1877 by Benaiah Gibb, an important Montreal collector and founding member of the Art Association of Montreal (the precursor to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts) this work was one of the Museum’s first acquisitions.