Tag: gustave moreau

Henri Evenepoel

The Artwork of Henri Evenepoel

Born at the city of Nice in October of 1872, Henri-Jacques-Edouard Evenepoel was a French-born Belgium artist who became associated with the Fauvist movement. Fauvism was an art movement that emphasized simplification of the subject, unconstrained brushwork and pure, strong colors over the representational values favored by the Impressionists. Inspired by the teachings of Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau, Fauvist artists included Henri Matisse, André Derain, Raoul Dufy, and Georges Braque, among others.

Born into a cultured family, Henri Evenepoel initially trained at a small art school in Sint-Josse-ten-Noode before attending the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels between 1889 and 1890. He entered Paris’s Ecole des Beaux-Arts In 1892 where he studied under Gustave Moreau and became acquainted with fellow students Henri Matisse, Georges Rouault, Edgar Maxence, and Albert Marquet. Evenepoel’s first exhibition of work occurred in April of 1894 at the Salon des Artistes Français with the portrait “Louise in Mourning”, a standing pose of his cousin Louise van Mattemburgh. 

Evenepoel continued working in portraiture and exhibited four portraits in 1895 at the Salon de Champs-de-Mars, the annual exhibition of the Sociéte Nationale des Beaux-Arts. His favorite subjects were his family and friends often presented against a neutral background, a style influenced by James Whistler and Édouard Manet. Evenepoel also painted somber-toned urban and genre scenes, designed advertising posters, and produced lithographs and etchings. In 1897, he purchased a Pocket Kodak camera and became technically proficient in developing and printing his own work. Over the course of his short life, Evenepoel shot almost nine hundred photographs, both portraits and novel studio images. 

For health reasons, Henri Evenepoel decided to travel to Algeria in October of 1897 and remained there for a six-month stay. Over this period, he painted a series of Orientalist subjects, many of them street scenes painted in the bright colors of the Fauvist style. During his winter months in Algeria, Evenepoel’s first solo exhibition was held at the Brussels Cercle Artistique from December in 1897 to January in 1898. After returning to Paris in May of 1898, he began to achieve both commercial and critical success. 

During Evenepoel’s lifetime, most of the painters considered to be modernists were generically known as impressionists. Although a modernist in the choice of his subjects, Evenepoel was a realist more in line with the works of Gustav Courbet and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, who had influenced his Parisian scenes. Marked by a refined and poetic sensibility, Evenepoel’s works were centered on artistic and idealistic considerations rather than the basic presentation of the subject.

At the beginning of successful career as an artist, Henri Evenepoel died of typhus on the twenty-seventh day in December of 1899 at the age of twenty-seven. There have been several retrospectives of Evenepoel’s work, the earliest being in 1913 and 1932 at the Galerie Georges Giroux in Brussels. Institutions holding later retrospectives include Antwerp’s Musée Royal des Beaux-Arts in 1953 and Brussels’s Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in 1972. 

Notes: An obsessive drawer, Henri Evenepoel traversed Paris on a daily basis while the city was preparing for the 1900 World Fair. He always carried a sketchbook with him and recorded all that he saw. The result was thousands of works from quick sketches to elaborate drawings of people and city scenes. In addition to sixteen paintings, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium houses over thirty drawings, several prints, letters from the artist to his father, and over eight hundred negatives which are currently being digitalized. 

The International Study Group has an article entitled “Henri Evenepoel, The Man and His Art” located at: https://isgbrussels.be/index.php/event/henri-evenepoel-man-and-his-art

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam holds a collection of twelve works by Henri Evenepoel: https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/prints/person/34602/evenepoel-henri

The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium contains a rich collection of Henri Evenepoel’s works on paper, mainly drawings, pastels, and watercolors executed between 1868 and 1914. An article on his life and work can be found at: https://fine-arts-museum.be/uploads/exhibitions/files/evenepoel_visitors_guide.pdf

Second Insert Image: Henri Evenepoel, “Orange Market at Blida”, 1898, Oil on Canvas, 81 x 125 cm, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

Bottom Insert Image: Henri Evenepoel, “Nude from the Rear in Gustave Moreau’s Studio”, 1894, Oil on Canvas on Panel, 47.2 x 36.5 cm, Private Collection

Jules-Élie Delaunay

Jules-Élie Delaunay, “Study for David Triumphant”, circa 1874, Black and White Chalk, Graphite on Tan Wove Paper, No Watermark, 37.8 x 25.6 cm, Martin du Louvre Gallery, Paris

Jules-Élie Delaunay, “David Triumphant”, circa 1874, Oil on Canvas, 147 x 114 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, France

Born in 1828 in the city of Nantes, Jules-Élie Delaunay was a French painter of portraits and historical scenes. Educated at an elite local school, he received his initial art education from Joachim Sotta, a local artist. In 1846, Delaunay was introduced to French Neo-classical painter Hippolyte Flandrin, who had been the favorite student of painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Two years later, he enrolled in Flandrin’s workshop at Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts. In addition to his studies with Flandrin, Delaunay also studied under French academic artist Louis Lamothe, principally a painter of portraits and historical scenes who had studied under both Ingress and Flandrin. 

Jules-Élie Delaunay regularly entered into competitions for the Prix de Rome without success; his unsuccessful entry for the 1855 Prix de Rome was his historical painting “Caesar and His Fortune, which depicted Caesar attempting to cross the Straits of Brindisi in disguise as a slave. In 1856 Delaunay was awarded the prize jointly with painter Félix Auguste Clément. The next year, his painting “Christ on the Cross in the Midst of Holy Women” was purchased by the French State in 1857. This enabled him to move to the French Academy in Rome in January of 1857.

Living intermittently as a pensioner at the Villa Medici, Delaunay traveled to Sienna, Bologna, Venice, Verona, and Padua, before settling in Rome where he studied Raphael’s works at the Vatican. While in Rome, Delaunay met and befriended Edgar Degas, Léon Bonnat, and the prominent Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau. With only two years difference in age, Moreau and Delaunay shared a rapport and became close life-long friends. Delaunay returned to France at the beginning of 1861 and began to make studies for his painting “The Plague of Rome”. 

In 1862, Jules-Élie Delaunay briefly visited London and, upon his return to Paris, began receiving commissions for decorative paintings. These included frescoes for the church of Saint Nicholas in Nantes, the three murals for the foyer of the Paris Opera House, murals for the Chapel of the Virgin at Paris’s Church of the Holy Trinity, and twelve paintings for the grand hall of the State Council at the Palais Royal. 

In 1869, Delaunay finished his oil on wood painting “The Plague of Rome”. which was based on an episode in Italian chronicler Jacques de Voragine’s “The Golden Legend”, collected stories of the lives of medieval church saints. Depicting an angel in flight loosening a plague on Rome, the painting was exhibited at the Salon du Palais de l’Industrie in Paris. It was purchased by Napoleon III for public display and now resides in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Delaunay followed this canvas with two historical paintings: the 1870 “Death of Nessus” and the 1872 “Diana”, a full-length nude portrait of the goddess of the hunt. 

Jules-Élie Delaunay’s 1874 “David Triumphant” tells the Old Testament story of David and Goliath and portrays the young hero David after he had slain the Philistine giant Goliath. David is shown holding his slingshot aloft and carrying the bloody sword used to behead his slain foe. This painting was exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1874 and attracted considerable attention. Other notable works that followed were the 1876 “Ixion Plunged into Hades”, an 1882 portraiture of the Shakespearean heroine Ophelia, and two different works portraying the classical Greek poet Sappho, which was also a recurrent theme in his friend Moreau’s paintings.

In 1878, Delaunay was awarded a first-class medal at the Paris Exposition and became an officer of the Legion of Honor. He was made a member of the Institute in the following year. In 1889 Delaunay was awarded the Medal of Honor and became director of one of the three official workshops at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. After winning the Grand Prize at the Paris Exposition Universelle, his health started to deteriorate. Delaunay died in September of 1891 in Paris and was buried at the Miséricorde Cemetery in Loire-Atlantique. As one of his closest friends, Gustavave Moreau was appointed the executor of his will. The Musée de Beaux-Arts in Nantes holds the largest collection of Jules-Élie Delaunay’s work

Top Insert Image: Jules-Elie Delaunay, “Self Portrait”, 1850, Etching Second State, Plate Size 11 x 8.1 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Middle Insert Image: Jules-Élie Delaunay, “In the Military Forge”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 114 x 146.8 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Jules-Élie Delaunay, Study of a Horse and Rider”, 1869-79, Charcoal with Gouache on Tan China Paper, 210 x 153 cm, Art Institute of Chicago

Gustave Moreau

Gustave Moreau, “Apollo Vanquishing the Serpent Python”, 1885, National Gallery of Canada

Gustave Moreau was a French Symbolist painter whose main emphasis was the illustration of biblical and mythological figures.

“Oedipus and the Sphinx”, one of his first symbolist paintings, was exhibited at the Salon of 1864. Moreau quickly gained a reputation for eccentricity. One commentator said Moreau’s work was “like a pastiche of Mantegna created by a German student who relaxes from his painting by reading Schopenhauer”. The painting currently resides in the permanent collection at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art