Museum Gust De Smet

The artist's former home, where he lived and worked for a time (1935-1943), now houses this museum. The house, together with a hundred works of art by the expressionist Gust De Smet, was left to the municipality of Deurle in his will and was opened to the public in 1950. He came to Deurle around 1929 to seek inspiration from its immediate rural surroundings. The museum includes a fully furnished living room, studio and bedroom. The walls are adorned with a selection of 100 artworks, mostly small canvases and drawings left behind when the painter died. Visiting this house you enter a world that provides a different view of the artist's life and work. 

Gust De Smet’s subjects include farmers and fishermen, the village, the countryside, popular entertainment and working class women. However, there is no particular social sentiment here, but rather a being in awe of the sometimes difficult peasant existence. In Village Sunshine, the artist focuses on a young woman in the foreground staring ahead with wide eyes. Her head is slightly turned which introduces a degree of movement in an otherwise static landscape with a wheat field, cubist houses and a setting sun. As is often the case with the artist, her absent dreamy gaze invokes a sense of melancholy.