De Kunstrijdster

A buoyant and exuberant painting, De Kunstrijdster depicts a circus scene with an elegantly dressed woman seated in the foreground, accompanied on both the left and the right side respectively by a circus performer on a horse and a grimacing clown. De Smet appears to have captured the moment at the end of a circus performance, as the woman and clown, both happily waving, seem about to exit the stage. This specific circus motif involving a central seated woman, a horse-riding lady and a circus clown is well-known of De Smet, having revisited it multiple times throughout the 1920's. The present painting, however, is rather exclusive and unique, for it truly testifies to the artistic maturity De Smet reached in the closing years of the 1920's. Emerging from the impressionist and cubist milieu of the early 20th century, in De Kunstrijdster De Smet is guided by his own artistic intuition from which he developed his characteristic expressionist palette; a vibrant colour scheme resonating with clarity and vividness combined with a less rigid and more organic handling of figures. A striking aspect of the present painting by De Smet is the beautiful colour composition and his use of warm earthly colour tonalities, specifically the expressiveness of the colour red, carefully balanced out by the dim ochre yellow background. Moreover, the delicate way in which De Smet alternated broad vibrant colour fields with subtle variegation in colour truly makes De Kunstrijdster a remarkable painting. (P. Boyens, Gust. De Smet Kroniek - Kunsthistorische Analyse, Antwerp, 1989, p. 399).