The Flanders of Trains and Chocolates is loud with ethnic self-assertion

The Flanders of "Trains and Chocolates" is loud with ethnic self-assertion. They also showed the common people itself at work and at play, dancing, boozing or in marvellous moments of domestic tranquillity.After Belgium was founded in 1830, the Flemish felt themselves neglected economically and despised as boorish by the dominant French-speakers Today, the situation is reversed. The Flemish painters did not confine themselves to great altarpieces and portraits. But there was always an earthy, plebeian side to this achievement.

But they helped to modernise Europe.With the prosperity came high art: the tapestries, the sculpture, architecture and matchless painting of the Flemish schools. They were not very popular, and anti-Flemish riots were a regular event. Through the Flemings, with their trade connections to Asia, came spices and cooking methods which cheered up the stodgy, watery diet of other Europeans. Their colonies taught the locals not only to weave but how to grow vegetables intensively, how to drain land, how to dig canals and plan new towns, how to produce handsome glazed pottery hard-fired enough to survive in one household for generations. Every northern king, from Scotland to Poland, wanted Flemings to come and settle. Another was the search for wool supplies, to feed the endlessly growing European demand for Flemish cloth.To get wool, the Flemish used their money and skills to manipulate the under-developed kingdoms around them.

One consequence was the appearance of early banking, as the great wool producers invented methods of credit. But in the Middle Ages, there arose the organised mass-production of high-quality woollen cloth, exported all over the known world. The Flemings have long memories, and do not forgive or forget their oppressors.Wool made Flanders The trade already existed in Roman times. It is a pious and Catholic land to this day, but never a servile one.

As these two pictures - and the rest of Maes's work in the exhibition - show, the people of Flanders have always refreshed themselves in off- time and holidays with heavy food, strong beer, indefatigable dancing, and hobbies from pigeon-fancying to cycling. It has existed for nearly 700 years, since it began to labour for the earliest capitalist employers. But Flanders lives on and so does Flemishness - that huge appetite for skilled work and sensual leisure which has been an engine for Europe's prosperity since the Middle Ages.This is Europe's first industrial working class. The Flemish economy has been as seismic as its history, booms punctuated by terrible times of unemployment and hunger, by bloody workers' risings and by the annihilating taxes of foreign empires. Yet Maes and Breughel look at the same people in the same way. Across the flat land of Flanders, the pikemen and dragoons and tank divisions of a dozen nations have stormed back and forth. The other, entitled A Flemish Proverb, was painted by Pieter Breughel the Younger about 400 years earlier.

The main picture, Mol: Silver Beach 1994 by Freya Maes, comes from "Trains and Chocolates", a new exhibition of contemporary Flemish photography. The two pictures are centuries apart, but these are unmistakeably the same people: strong, industrious, confident about their bodies, from hard-working fingers to big limbs and well-fed torsos. This Is the Flemish working class taking its ease. It proves the inter-dependency of forward-looking culture and backwards- glancing heritage.'The School Bag' is published by Faber at pounds 20 (hardback) and pounds 12.99 (paperback).. It shows how different ages can communicate with each other about unchangeably important human subjects.