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Ixxvi ART IN BELGIUM AND HOLLAND.
times with Corot, sometimes with Rousseau. The fact that he and
his companions painted much in the woods of Tervueren has led
critics to speak of a “TIervueren School’. Among living landscape
painters who enjoy a well-deserved reputation are Joseph Heymans
(b. 1839), the vigorous Frans Courtens (b. 1853), Albert Baertson
(b. 1866), painter of quiet towns, Victor Gilsoul (b. 1867), and many
others. Théodore Verstraete (1851-1907) and Frans van Leemputten
(b. 1850) devote themselves to landscape and village-scenes with
figures in the manner of the French ‘plein air school. Emile Claus
(b. 1849), in his brilliant figure-subjects and lands s, worships
at the shrine of the impressionism that has developed from the last-
named school; and the neo-impressionist school also has its follow-
ers in Belgium, the most prominent of whom is Théo van Ryssel-
berghe (b. 1862). Alexander Struys (b. 1852), one of the painters
of popular life proper, has reaped great success in Germany and
France as well as in Belgium with his vigorous scenes, beautiful in
tone, from the life of the poor, the aged, and the sick. More indi-
viduality and more independence are evinced by Léon Frédéric
(b. 1856) and Eugéne Laermans (b. 1864). The paintings of both
are permeated with the profoundest social sympathy ; but while the
figures in the curiously conventionalized compositions of the latter
seem to stand beneath the shadow of an inevitable fate, Frédéric in
his crowded triptychs, painted with all the resources of the ‘plein air
school, leaves room for the hope of a better time to come (the least
in his early work ‘Les Marchands de craie’, p. 122), while he has
produced such charming pictures as ‘The Brook’, consisting almost
entirely of the glowing healthy bodies of children. Within the last
fifteen years the symbolic, the archaic, and all similar movements
have found adherents among the younger painters of Belgium. The
Cercle d’Art Idéaliste, for example, founded in 1896, excluded from
its exhibitions all works that are mere reproductions of nature and
not synthetic compositions. But practically the only one of those
artists known beyond the limits of Belgium is Fernand Khnopff
(b. 1858), with his enigmatic female forms.
In Scunprure in Belgium during the Empire period the leading
masters were Gilles Lambert Godecharle (1751-1835) and Matthias
Kessels (1784-1836), a native of Holland. The former is represented
in Brussels Museum by an excellent bust of Napoleon I. and by a
graceful group (‘Caritas’); of the latter the Museum possesses a de-
licately sympathetic sepulchral figure and a scene from the Deluge.
In the next generation the prominent figure was Willem Geefs
(1805-83), the most eminent member of a wide-spreading family
of artists and an industrious sculptor, whose portrait-statues (e.g.
that of Rubens at Antwerp) are met with all over Belgium — always
creditable, often very excellent, but hardly ever impressive. His
most able work is perhaps the monument to Count de Mérode in
Ste. Gudule at Brussels. Eugéne Simonis (1810-82) achieved popul- |
