The Blind House

By 1892 Degouve de Nuncques had walked away from the Brussels academy and taught himself to paint, much of it at night. This canvas is small, barely two feet tall: a dark house with an almost blank front wall, two windows lit from within, and a still pool before it holding the reflection. He called it La maison aveugle, the blind house, and later described it as sombre nature holding a mirror up to his own face. Nothing happens in the scene, and that stillness is the whole effect. About 30 years afterward a younger Belgian, René Magritte, began painting streets where a lamp-lit house stands under a bright daytime sky, and this quiet picture is regularly named as an ancestor of those images. It is one of more than 20 works by him that the Kröller-Müller holds, the largest single group of his art anywhere.