SYMB 6211
It is striking to realize that Fernand Khnopff’s landscapes are always located in Fosset and its immediate vicinity. From 1880 to 1897, he produced forty landscapes, not including the drawings in his sketchbooks.
Khnopff did not try to render what man sees when looking at nature, but what he feels. It is a deep awareness of a frame of mind, a ‘landscape mood’ or a ‘representation of nature transcended into a mood with a symbolic meaning’.
These are not keepsake quick notes as in his small sketches, but well-built, well-thought out and subtly rendered compositions, which are not imitations but representations of nature.
The subject matter of Fosset’s landscapes is memory: the interior picture remaining after the direct experience of an ideal nature which is no more but which transpires through the views of Fosset and the surrounding nature (from Dominique Marechal, in catalogue 'Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921)', Brussels, RMFAB, 2004, p. 40-43, 104-111, 208-218)
English Translation by Marianne Reynolds (2010)