Emile Claus toiled as a baker's apprentice, railway inspector and linen merchant before his father gave him permission to study Replica Handbags at the Antwerp Academy in 1869. Following breakthrough success at the Antwerp Salon of 1882 with his large-format Le Combat de coqs, Claus bought a house in Astene on the banks of the river Lys which would become the legendary Villa Zonneschijn, and although he would keep his Antwerp studio until 1890, he would remain there for the rest of his life. Five years later, Claus took a studio in Paris and began to exhibit at the Salon. It was only after 1890, following many winters spent in Paris, and with the encouragement of Henri Le Sidaner, that Claus liberated himself from the tighter technique of Naturalist painters such as Jules Bastien-Lepage, and began to experiment with an impressionistic brushstroke and new ways of capturing light. The artist did not limit himself to registering the effects of light and colour, and modified his impressions according to the sent.mes nt that inspired him. Claus avoided modernist rhetoric and had only a passing interest in trends such as Pointillism and Fauvism. Rather Claus' work helped define a new school of art all of its own - Luminism, for the proponents of Impressionism in Belgium.

Painted in 1896, the present work holds all the best aspects of Claus' luminist technique: the bold, tactile brushwork, juxtapositions of compressed and open space, and saturated pigments of sun-soaked flower heads, dried wheat and cool green patches of verdant shade and leaves rustling in the wind. These elements hark back to such early influences as Claude Monet and Henri Le Sidaner, while also revealing Claus' personal vision of nature. Indeed the exuberant flowering froth of the wild carrots interspersed with pink flowers and blades of fresh grass are kinetic with movement and growth. Such a sense of energy in the composition was a reflection of the artist's own personality, as a contemporary writer noted; as a contemporary writer noted; Claus seemed to vibrate 'with a fine, subtle nervousness; everything about him converges on a smiling, delicate, sensual charm, which flows from him as if magnetism' (as quoted in P. & V. Berko, Dictionary of Belgian painters born between 1750 & 1875, Brussels, 1981, p. 101). Claus imbues the present work with a joy in his surroundings, an appreciation of both the ambience and more tangible, mundane elements of his subject, such as the farmhouse and barn in the background. He reprised this compositional device in his painting Les Marguerites of 1897 (private collects ion).