'Hero Painting'

What a painting! "A View of the Het Steen". It's autumn, the lights are on. The year is turning and yet here is a landscape - although it's vast, it has an intimacy, almost a cosiness.

A golden light and it's going to be cold and it's going to be wintry and you have - what seem to me - picturesque little elements such as the huntsman, the dog and the peasants on their wagon going to market, or whatever.

You have the female figures leaving the Het Steen, you have the birds flying and the cattle over here and the gigantic ducks in the foreground here, and none of it - the whacky, totally distorted perspective - none of it matters. It is totally subsumed into a miraculous kind of vision of autumn.

It is essentially a very, very abstract painting. It is - before it's any of these things - it is someone's concept, Rubens's concept, of what it feels like to be in the lowlands in autumn.

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