In Thuin or The Tennis Game

Painted in 1889 at Thuin in Belgium, this early canvas showing a tennis game is one of Van Rysselberghe's most fascinating transitional works: it documents the precise moment when he was adopting divisionist technique, having encountered Seurat's 'Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte' at the 1886 Les XX exhibition in Brussels. Now in the Phoebus Foundation collection in Antwerp, the painting shows bourgeois leisure — competitive tennis on a private court — treated with the new optical method that Van Rysselberghe was making his own. Tennis as a subject was itself remarkably contemporary in 1889, the sport having spread from England to the Continent only in the preceding decade. The combination of a thoroughly modern leisure subject with an equally modern pictorial technique makes this canvas a double statement of avant-garde contemporaneity, Belgian and international simultaneously.

The transition to divisionism is visible in the systematic colour touch application that covers the canvas surface, though Van Rysselberghe's early divisionism is sometimes looser than Seurat's most rigorous practice. The outdoor leisure setting provides a range of colour conditions — green grass, white tennis costumes, blue sky — that the technique handles with characteristic luminosity.