Farmer (or The Answer)

Narrator:

Many dream of a humbler life in the countryside.

To escape stress...

Slow down...

...and spend more time closer to nature.

At the beginning of the 20th century, wars and social inequalities created a lot of insecurity in Europe, and many found it difficult to believe in the future.

Several artists sought a quieter and more meaningful life, away from the hustle and bustle of the big city.

The Belgian artist Gustav Van de Woestyne was one of these...

Van de Woestyne was a religious man, very concerned with existential questions, and was looking for answers.

Combined with poor health, the choice to move perhaps came a little easier...

He wanted to live a very different type of life and tried to join a convent before moving to the small countryside town of Sint-Maartens-Latem, outside the large city of Ghent. 

He lived here for nearly a decade, and it was in Sint-Maartens-Latem, that he found something real in the lives and work of the people.

His paintings show a kind of elevated view of the ordinary life of rural people, and their relationship and dependence on nature.

These were also familiar motifs in late medieval art.

The farmer was often a motif in Van de Woestyne's paintings, and he describes in his own notes that:

The man in this artwork was a villager who would work in the artist's garden night after night. And how he didn't do a particularly good job, but he was a great storyteller...

Van de Woestyne depicts him up close, sitting and talking in front of the farmhouse.

The detailed aging of the man's face is reminiscent of early paintings of Flemish peasants in some of the famous paintings by Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel.

The artwork has a second title - The Answer – written on the back of the painting in the artists' own handwriting. This has been interpreted as giving the portrait a deeper spiritual meaning – that he felt he was finding meaning by living rurally...