1858-1921 Belgian Fernand Khnopff Gallery Fernand Khnopff was born to a wealthy family that was part of the high bourgeoisie for generations. Khnopff's ancestors had lived in Flanders since the early 17th-century but were of Austrian and Portuguese descent. Most male members of his family had been lawyers or judges, and young Fernand was destined for a juridical career. In his early childhood (1859-1864) he lived in Bruges where his father was appointed Substitut Du Procureur Du Roi. His childhood memories of the medieval city of Bruges would play a significant role in his later work. In 1864 the family moved to Brussels. To please his parents he went to law school at the Free University of Brussels (now divided into the Universite Libre de Bruxelles and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel) when he was 18 years old. During this period he developed a passion for literature, discovering the works of Baudelaire, Flaubert, Leconte de Lisle and other mostly French authors. With his younger brother Georges Khnopff - also a passionate amateur of contemporary music and poetry - he started to frequent Jeune Belgique ("Young Belgium"), a group of young writers including Max Waller, Georges Rodenbach, Iwan Gilkin and Emile Verhaeren. Khnopff left University due to a lack of interest in his law studies and began to frequent the studio of Xavier Mellery, who made him familiar with the art of painting. On the 25th of October 1876 he enrolled for the Cours De Dessin Apres Nature ("course of drawing after nature") at the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts en Bruxelles. At the Academie, his most famous fellow student was James Ensor, whom he disliked from the start. Between 1877 and 1880 Khnopff made several trips to Paris where he discovered the work of Delacroix, Ingres, Moreau and Stevens. At the Paris World Fair of 1878 he became acquainted with the oeuvre of Millais and Burne-Jones. During his last year at the Acad??mie in 1878-1879 he neglected his classes in Brussels and lived for a while in Passy, were he visited the Cours Libres of Jules Joseph Lefebvre at the Acad??mie Julian.   Related Paintings of Fernand Khnopff :. | Memory of Bruges,The Entrance of the Beguinage | The Caresses | Mary von Stuck in a Red Armchair | White Black and Gold | Memory of Flanders A Canal |
Related Artists:
MacLeod, William Douglas
American, 1811-92
Henry de Groux
Belgian 1867-1930 Henry de Groux (1866 in Brussels - 1930 in Marseilles) was a Belgian Symbolist painter, sculptor and lithographer. His 1889 painting Christ aux Outrages, widely described as his masterwork, depicted Jesus being attacked by a mob. Later in life, he produced many works depicting the horrors of the First World War. Ride of the Valkyries (ca. 1890) Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels, BelgiumDe Groux was a member of les XX, but was expelled when he refused to have his works displayed in the same gallery as Vincent van Gogh. He subsequently moved to Paris, where he befriended Emile Zola; during the social unrest resulting from the Dreyfus affair, de Groux acted as one of Zola's bodyguards. As well, de Groux was a fervent diarist; beginning in 1892, he produced 18 volumes detailing the life of a European artist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 2002, his descendants donated these volumes to the Institut national d'histoire de l'art; selected excerpts were published in 2007 Henry de Groux 1866-1930 - journal - Henry De Groux, Rodolphe Rapetti, Pierre Wat - Editions Kime.
Martin Drolling
French Academic Painter, 1752-1817,After receiving initial training from an unknown painter in Selestat, Drolling moved to Paris, where he attended courses at the Acad?mie Royale. He supplemented his education there by studying Flemish and Dutch Old Masters in the collection at the Luxembourg Palace. From the Flemish school he derived his own rich impasto, while the Dutch was to influence him in his meticulous, supremely descriptive and unsentimental style of painting as well as his choice of subject-matter: unfussy bourgeois interiors and frank portraits. Drolling first exhibited at the Salon de la Correspondance in 1781 and again in 1782 and 1789. After the French Revolution he was able to participate in the Salon at the Louvre, despite the fact that he had never become a member of the Academie Royale. He exhibited from 1793 to 1817, although the majority of his works extant today were shown after 1800. From 1802 to 1813 he was employed by the Sevres porcelain manufactory, and many of his designs were engraved.