Église Sainte Croix (minuit au faubourg)

Painted in 1886 and now held in the Museum of Ixelles in Brussels, this nocturnal view of the Église Sainte-Croix — subtitled 'midnight in the suburb' — dates to a critical transitional moment in Van Rysselberghe's development. The same year Seurat's 'La Grande Jatte' was exhibited in Brussels, fundamentally changing how Belgian painters thought about colour and surface. This canvas, however, still works in a pre-divisionist mode, using the effects of artificial night lighting to explore a subject that occupied many late nineteenth-century urban painters: the transformation of familiar city spaces under gas or electric light. The suburban church at midnight occupies a tradition stretching from Whistler's nocturnes to Monet's atmospheric cathedral series. Van Rysselberghe's choice of this subject on the eve of his own radical stylistic shift gives the work a particular historical interest as a document of where he stood at the moment of his conversion to Neo-Impressionism.

Oil on canvas worked in a broad, atmospheric technique characteristic of Van Rysselberghe's pre-divisionist period. The handling of artificial light sources and their reflection in wet pavement or surrounding surfaces demonstrates sophisticated tonal control. Dark masses of the church and surrounding buildings are constructed through carefully calibrated value contrasts rather than the colour contrasts of his later work.