A family gathering in an orchard

In the summer of 1889 the Monnom family took rooms at Thuin, in southern Belgium, and van Rysselberghe went along. He set up in what was probably the old orchard of the nearby Abbey of Aulne and began this canvas there, laying the bright July light down in thousands of small separate dots of color. Five women fill the garden, each absorbed in a task of her own, none of them looking at another, and the scene holds still in the warmth of late morning. The woman in the blue dress is Maria Monnom. He married her that autumn and finished the painting the following year.