René François Ghislain Magritte (French: [ʁəne fʁɑ̃swa ɡilɛ̃ maɡʁit]; 21 November 1898 – 15 August 1967) was a Belgian surrealist artist known for his depictions of familiar objects in unfamiliar, unexpected contexts, which often provoked questions about the nature and boundaries of reality and representation. His imagery has influenced pop art, minimalist art, and conceptual art.
Vincent Willem van Gogh (Dutch: [ˈvɪnsɛnt ˈʋɪləɱ‿vɑŋ‿ˈɣɔx] ; 30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade he created approximately 2100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life. They include landscapes, still lifes, portraits and self-portraits, and are characterised by bold, symbolic colours, and dramatic, impulsive and highly expressive brushwork that contributed to the foundations of modern art. Only one of his paintings was known by name to have been sold during his lifetime. Van Gogh became famous after his suicide at age 37, which followed years of poverty and mental illness.
Born into an upper-middle-class family, Van Gogh drew as a child and was serious, quiet and thoughtful, but showed signs of mental instability. As a young man, he worked as an art dealer, often travelling, but became depressed after he was transferred to London. He turned to religion and spent time as a missionary in southern Belgium. Later he drifted into ill-health and solitude. He was keenly aware of modernist trends in art and, while back with his parents, took up painting in 1881. His younger brother, Theo, supported him financially, and the two of them kept up a long correspondence by letter.
Van Gogh's early works consisted of mostly still lifes and depictions of peasant labourers. In 1886, he moved to Paris, where he met members of the artistic avant-garde, including Émile Bernard and Paul Gauguin, who were seeking new paths beyond Impressionism. Frustrated in Paris and inspired by a growing spirit of artistic change and collaboration, in February 1888, Van Gogh moved to Arles in southern France, to establish an artistic retreat and commune. Once there, Van Gogh's art changed. His paintings grew brighter and he turned his attention to the natural world, depicting local olive groves, wheat fields and sunflowers. Van Gogh invited Gauguin to join him in Arles and eagerly anticipated Gauguin's arrival in the fall of 1888.
Van Gogh suffered from psychotic episodes and delusions. Though he worried about his mental stability, he often neglected his physical health, did not eat properly and drank heavily. His friendship with Gauguin ended after a confrontation with a razor when, in a rage, he severed part of his left ear. He spent time in psychiatric hospitals, including a period at Saint-Rémy. After he discharged himself and moved to the Auberge Ravoux in Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris, he came under the care of the homeopathic doctor Paul Gachet. His depression persisted, and on 27 July 1890, Van Gogh is believed to have shot himself in the chest with a revolver, dying from his injuries two days later.
Van Gogh's art gained critical recognition after his death and his life story captured the public imagination as an emblem of misunderstood genius, due in large part to the efforts of his widowed sister-in-law Johanna van Gogh-Bonger. His bold use of color, expressive line and thick application of paint inspired avant garde artistic groups like the Fauves and German Expressionists in the early 20th century. Van Gogh's work gained widespread critical and commercial success in the following decades, and he has become a lasting icon of the romantic ideal of the tortured artist. Today, Van Gogh's works are among the world's most expensive paintings to have ever sold, and his legacy is honoured by a museum in his name, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which holds the world's largest collection of his paintings and drawings.
Guillaume Victor Van der Hecht, (30 June 1817, Brussels - 10 September 1891, Brussels) was a Belgian landscape painter, lithographer and designer; in the Romantic style.
Victor Servranckx (26 June 1897 – 11 December 1965) was a Belgian abstract painter and designer.
Servranckx was born in Diegem (Machelen) and studied from 1913 to 1917 at the Brussels Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. There, in 1916, he met René Magritte, with whom he wrote "Pure Art: A Defence of the Aesthetic" in 1922. Servranckx's style was influenced by cubism, constructivism, and surrealism. He died in Vilvoorde.
Antoine "Anto" Carte (8 December 1886 - 15 February 1954) was a Belgian painter.
Antoine Carto was born in Mons in 1886. His father was a joiner. Anto Carte was first apprenticed to François Depooter, an interior painter, and then studied art at the academies of Mons and Brussels, and in Paris. He started working in a Symbolist style, but after the First World War became a Flemish Expressionist painter in the style of the painters of the group of Sint-Martens-Latem like Gustave Van de Woestijne. In 1917 he had his first exposition, of illustrations he made for a work by Emile Verhaeren. He exposed together with the Flemish Expressionists at the 1923 Salon d'Automne in Paris. He had a solo exhibition in Pittsburgh, at the Carnegie Institute, in 1924, where all 60 paintings were sold. Retrospective exhibitions at the Museum of Mons were organised in 1949 and in 1995.Later in his career, he designed many posters and stained glass windows, including in 1927 the windows for a new building at the University of Mons-Hainaut. He also designed a 50 Belgian Francs banknote.In 1928, he founded the art group Groupe Nervia together with Louis Buisseret. From 1932 on, he was a professor at the La Cambre school and at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels.He lived most of his career in Braine-le-Château, and died in Ixelles in 1954.
Joseph Poelaert (21 March 1817 – 3 November 1879) was a Belgian architect. He was entrusted with important projects in Brussels, such as Saint Catherine's Church, the Church of Our Lady of Laeken, the Congress Column, the Royal Theatre of la Monnaie and above all, the Palace of Justice. He was also the great-uncle of the architect Henri Van Dievoet.
Pierre Culliford (French: [kylifɔʁd]; 25 June 1928 – 24 December 1992) was a Belgian comics writer and artist who worked under the pseudonym Peyo ([pejo]). His best-known works are the comic book series The Smurfs and Johan and Peewit, the latter in which the Smurfs first appeared.
Hendrik Emil (Rik) Wouters (21 August 1882 – 11 July 1916) was a Belgian painter, sculptor and draughtsman. Wouters produced 200 paintings, drawings and sculptures in his 34 years before his illness-caused death. he died partway through the First World War on 11 July 1916 in Amsterdam. A sculptor, painter, draughtsman and etcher of typically fauvist style, Wouters' art resembled the works of artists including Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne and André Derain- the "forefathers" of Fauvism.Rik Wouters' art, according to Adams (2018), reflects themes of "warmth and tenderness", his paintings characterised by an array of colours and brush strokes, frequently leaving unpainted canvas to increase this effect. Often depicting his muse-wife, Hélène, Wouters disregarded hidden symbolic inferences within his art in favour of a more "simplistic and genuine" style, distancing himself from mainstream artists. Wouters was educated in fine arts academies in Mechelen and Brussels, however his works usually slightly differ stylistically from other Fauvist artists.Wouters is known primarily for his sculptures and paintings including 'Lady in blue' (1914), 'Self-portrait with cigar' (1914) and ‘Chrysanthèmes’ (1915).
Jean Delville, born Jean Libert (19 January 1867 – 19 January 1953), was a Belgian symbolist painter, author, poet, polemicist, teacher, and Theosophist. Delville was the leading exponent of the Belgian Idealist movement in art during the 1890s. He held, throughout his life, the belief that art should be the expression of a higher spiritual truth and that it should be based on the principle of Ideal, or spiritual Beauty. He executed a great number of paintings during his active career from 1887 to the end of the second World War (many now lost or destroyed) expressing his Idealist aesthetic. Delville was trained at the Académie des Beaux-arts in Brussels and proved to be a highly precocious student, winning most of the prestigious competition prizes at the Academy while still a young student. He later won the Belgian Prix de Rome which allowed him to travel to Rome and Florence and study at first hand the works of the artists of the Renaissance. During his time in Italy he created his celebrated masterpiece L'Ecole de Platon (1898), which stands as a visual summary of his Idealist aesthetic which he promoted during the 1890s in his writings, poetry and exhibitions societies, notably the Salons d'Art Idéaliste.
Characteristically, Delville's paintings are idea-based, expressing philosophical ideals derived from contemporary hermetic and esoteric traditions. At the start of his career, his esoteric perspective was mostly influenced by the work of Eliphas Levi, Edouard Schuré, Joséphin Péladan and Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, and later by the Theosophical writings of Helena Blavatsky and Annie Besant. The main underlying theme of his paintings, especially during his early career, has to do with initiation and the transfiguration of the inner life of the soul towards a higher spiritual purpose. Specifically they deal with themes symbolising Ideal love, death and transfiguration as well as representations of Initiates ('light bringers'), and the relationship between the material and metaphysical dimensions. His paintings and finished drawings are an expression of a highly sensitive visionary imagination articulated through precisely observed forms drawn from nature. He also had a brilliant gift for colour and composition and excelled in the representation of human anatomy. Many of his major paintings, such as his Les Trésors de Sathan (1895), l'Homme-Dieu (1903) and Les Ames errantes (1942), represent dozens of figures intertwined in complex arrangements and painted with highly detailed anatomical accuracy. He was an astonishingly skilled draughtsman and painter capable of producing highly expressive works on a grand scale, many of which can be seen in public buildings in Brussels, including the Palais de Justice.
Delville's artistic style is strongly influenced by the Classical tradition. He was a lifelong advocate of the value of the Classical training taught in the Academies. He believed that the discipline acquired as a result of this training was not an end in itself, but rather a valuable means of acquiring a solid drawing and painting technique to allow artists freely to develop their personal artistic style, without inhibiting their individual creative personality. Delville was a respected Academic art teacher. He was employed at the Glasgow School of Art from 1900 to 1906 and as Professor of drawing at the Académie des Beaux-arts in Brussels thereafter until 1937.
He was also a prolific and talented author. He published a very great number of journal articles during his lifetime as well as four volumes of poetry, including his Le Frisson du Sphinx (1897) and Les Splendeurs Méconnues (1922). He authored more than a dozen books and pamphlets relating to art and esoteric subjects. The most important of his published books include his esoteric works, Dialogue entre Nous (1895) and Le Christ Reviendra (1913) as well as his seminal work on Idealist art, La Mission de l'Art (1900). He also created and edited several contemporary journals and newspapers during the 1890s promoting his Idealist aesthetic including L'Art Idéaliste and La Lumière.
Delville was an energetic artistic entrepreneur, creating several influential artistic exhibition societies, including Pour l'Art and the Salons de l'Art Idéaliste in the 1890s and later, the Société de l'Art Monumental in the 1920s which was responsible for the decoration of public buildings including the mosaics in the hemicycle of the Cinquantenaire in Brussels. He also founded the very successful Coopérative artistique, which provided affordable art materials for artists at the time.