Karl Girardet

Washerwomen by the river, oil on canvas by Karl Girardet

Thomas Sidney Cooper was one of the foremost animal painters of the Victorian period. He was born in Canterbury, Kent, and as a small child he began to show strong artistic inclinations, but the circumstances of his family did not allow him to receive any systematic training. By the time he was twelve years old, he was working in the shop of a coach painter. Later he obtained a job as a scene painter, and he alternated between these two occupations for about eight years. He still felt a strong desire to become an artist, and all his spare moments were spent drawing and painting from nature. At the age of twenty, he went to London, drew for a while in the British Museum, and was admitted as a student of the Royal Academy. Subsequently, he returned to Canterbury, where he was able to earn a living as a drawing master and by the sale of sketches and drawings. In 1827, he settled in Brussels and married before taking up a position as a teacher in Brussels in 1829. There he befriended Eugène Joseph Verboeckhoven, the great Belgian animal painter, who greatly influenced his style. He was also influenced by the 17th Century Dutch School. Because of the Belgian Revolution, he returned to London where he settled and first exhibited at Suffolk Street in 1833. He exhibited forty-eight pictures at the British Institution between 1833 and 1863. ‘Landscape and Cattle’, Royal Academy 1833, was shown until 1902 without a break - a record for a continuous exhibit at the Royal Academy. Sheep and cattle were his most frequent subjects, although he did paint a few figurative subjects. Cooper collaborated between 1847 and 1870 with Frederick Richard Lee...

Auguste Moreau-Deschanvres (1838-1913) A student of Julien Potier at the Valenciennes academic schools, the painter Auguste Moreau-Deschanvres (1838-1913) lived in the house-studio h...

Horses resting at the watering place Oil on canvas by Jules Pierre Van Biesbroeck Jules Van Biesbroeck was born in Italy in 1873 during h...

The Watsman, a painted view between Obersee and Koningsee, Upper Bavaria. Study painted in 1856 by François Roffiaen. François Roffiaen (1820-1898): Biography François Roffiaen's f...

A masterfully painted scene originating from the artist's studio In this painting, Langaskens brings together several motifs that were also the subject of his graphic work: the blind man, the priest, the nun and the farm that also appears in the famous etching "les toits rouges" (the red roofs). These elements are brought together in a dynamic and colourful composition, where the similarities to that other Belgian painter, Anto Carte, are striking. Combining these elements in this way creates a certain tension. Is the work about mercy (helping a blind man), or are we spectators of a scene where a poor wretch's purse is stolen? Striking is the use of impasto, in which the painter emphasises the texture of fabrics and skin via flowing lines. Maurice Langaskens 1884 - 1946 Biography A Belgian painter and printmaker, Maurice (Maurits) Langaskens enrolled in the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1901, and was trained as a decorative painter by the leading Belgian muralist and sculptor Constant Montald. From early on, Langaskens was recognized as a fine draughtsman, and won several prizes at the Académie. After living and studying for a few months in France in 1906, mainly in Dijon, the young Langaskens settled in Schaerbeek, outside Brussels. He began his independent career in 1907, when he exhibited three decorative paintings at the Salon in Brussels for the first time and also had an exhibition of his work shown at the Salle Boute in the city. The following year he contributed six paintings to the 16th annual exhibition of the Belgian artist’s association ‘Pour l’Art’ in Brussels, where he was to exhibit frequently over the course of his later career, until 1941. (Langaskens also designed the poster for the 17th ‘Pour l’Art’ exhibition in 1909.) Also in 1908, one of his paintings was selected for an exhibition of modern Belgian art in Berlin. Much of Langaskens’s early work was in a vibrant and visually arresting Art Nouveau or Symbolist style. This bold and colourful manner also translated well into large-scale mural commissions, and he soon became one of the leading painter-decorators of the early 20th century in Belgium. His decoration of the town hall of the city of Zoutleeuw in 1912 earned the artist considerable fame and the praise of his teacher and mentor Montald: ‘He was one of the best students in the class; today he is the most outstanding artist among the decorators of our time.’ The same year the first of several exhibitions of Langasken’s work was mounted at the Cercle Artistique et Littéraire in Brussels. The outbreak of the First World War, however, brutally interrupted the rise of the artist’s successful career. Drafted into the Belgian army at the beginning of August 1914, Langaskens was captured by the Germans after less than a fortnight. He spent the next three and half years as a prisoner of war, at internment camps at Sennelager, Münsterlager and Göttingen. He produced numerous, mostly small-scale paintings and watercolours of portraits and depictions of many of his fellow prisoners, as well as scenes of daily camp life, that are today regarded as among his finest and most personal works. It was also during this period that he painted two of his best-known pictures, the large canvas In Memoriam, painted in 1916 and depicting the burial of a Belgian soldier by his comrades, and the monumental triptych Repose en Paix, painted between 1915 and 1918. After his liberation and return to Belgium, Langaskens exhibited over eighty of the paintings and drawings that he had produced as a prisoner of war at the Galerie Sneyers in Brussels in 1918. After the Armistice, Langaskens - suffering from aphasia and nervous disorders brought about by his long confinement - painted mainly easel pictures of winter landscapes, rustic genre scenes and floral subjects, and also produced a number of designs for tapestries, book illustrations and stained-glass windows. Within a few years, however, his health had recovered and he returned to undertaking large-scale decorative mural commissions. In 1920 Langaskens was one of the founders, alongside Montald, Jean Delville, Emile Fabry...

Søeborg, Axel (1872-1939) The ochre yawn of autumn and the bitter sleep of winter are the preoccupations of Danish artist Axel Søeborg's landscapes. With his singular hand, Søeborg s...

In "Nostalgia" a 21st -century Nigerian painter uses an impressionist technique the brushwork clearly visible —to evoke the haziness between wakefulne...

A monumental Italian landscape oil painting. "Apuan Mountains" of Italy (The Italian Alps) Shepherds in the mountains with the village of Seravezza below. Painted by Andreas Marko...

Attributed Charles François Grenier de Lacroix or Charles - François Lacroix de Marseille (1700 - 1782) as signed lower left on the stone “Lacroix”. The scene of the departure of nobles on a ship, somewhere among the Mediterranean landscapes at sunrise. Lacroix's sense of color and attention to detail are particularly impressive: the sea is calm, the sun is rising and as a soft pink hue begins to emerge in the clouds, the morning haze has not yet cleared and the air is clear and clean, large ship...

The scene of this landscape unfolds with a tranquil river nestled between rolling hills, its heavily wooded banks casting a serene backdrop. In the center of the composition, two fis...

Signed lower left: Charles Hunt Jr., (1829–1900), was British. Painting resembles those of Ch. Dickens novels especially dress fashion. An unequal snowball fight, three tomboys again...

Attributed Paul Von Franken (1818-1884), famous Gemany a genre and landscape painter, signed bottom right. Fertile scenery coastal town with castle, mosque, minaret, large travelers ...