Henry Clemens van de Velde was a Belgian painter, architect, interior designer, and art theorist. Together with Victor Horta and Paul Hankar, he is considered one of the founders of Art Nouveau in Belgium. He worked in Paris with Siegfried Bing, the founder of the first gallery of Art Nouveau in Paris. Van de Velde spent the most important part of his career in Germany and became a major figure in the German Jugendstil. He had a decisive influence on German architecture and design at the beginning of the 20th century.
Jean Delville, born Jean Libert, 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 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.
Les XX was a group of twenty Belgian painters, designers and sculptors, formed in 1883 by the Brussels lawyer, publisher, and entrepreneur Octave Maus. For ten years, they held an annual exhibition of their art; each year 20 other international artists were also invited to participate in their exhibition. Painters invited include Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne (1890), and Vincent van Gogh.
Octave Maus was a Belgian art critic, writer, lawyer and cousin of the painters Anna and Eugène Boch.
La Libre Esthétique was an artistic society founded in 1893 in Brussels, Belgium to continue the efforts of the artists' group Les XX dissolved the same year. To reduce conflicts between artists invited or excluded, artists were no longer admitted to the society, thus all exhibitors were now invited.
The Société Libre des Beaux-Arts was an organization formed in 1868 by Belgian artists to react against academicism and to advance Realist painting and artistic freedom. Based in Brussels, the society was active until 1876, by which time the aesthetic values it espoused had infiltrated the official Salon. It played a formative role in establishing avant-gardism in Belgium.
Antoine-Félix Bouré, known in his own time as Félix Bouré but sometimes found in modern scholarship as Antoine Bouré, was a Belgian sculptor, best known for his monumental lions.
Émile Sacré (1844–1882) was a Belgian painter, after whom the Prix Émile Sacré was named.
Isabella or Isabelle Alice Errera was a Belgian art historian specializing in textiles.
Events in the year 1894 in Belgium.
Jean-Joseph Delvin was a Belgian painter who specialized in scenes with animals.
Henry Ottmann (also Henri Ottmann) (10 April 1877 – 1 June 1927) was a French painter and printmaker.
Michel Draguet is a Belgian art historian, professor at the Université libre de Bruxelles, and previously the director and CEO of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium since May 2005. Draguet is a member of the board of the federal administration for science: the Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO).
Charles Scharrès was a Belgian pianist, composer, and pedagogue.
Joseph Middeleer was a Belgian painter and aquarellist known for his genre scenes, figures, landscapes and still lifes. He was an academically trained artist whose style and themes reflected initially the retro genre style of Belgian Romantic-historical painting. He also dealt with social realist themes and in the 1890s he painted a number of symbolist works.
The following lists events that happened during 1881 in the Kingdom of Belgium.
Gisbert Combaz, or Ghisbert Combaz, was a Belgian painter, lithographer, illustrator, poster artist, furniture designer, sculptor, art educator, art historian and lawyer. He originally trained and practised as a lawyer, but gave up his legal career to dedicate himself to art education and art. He was one of the leading Belgian Art Nouveau artists. Despite his talents as a painter, he is now mainly known for his poster designs and postcards as well as his First World War drawings expressing his hatred for the German occupiers. His work showed a strong influence of his in-depth study of Japanese and Chinese art.
Le canal en Flandre par temps triste is an oil on canvas painting by Belgian painter Théo van Rysselberghe, created in 1894.
Charles Mertens, Karel Jozef Mertens or Karel Mertens was a Belgian draughtsman, painter, muralist, etcher and illustrator. He is known for his portraits, landscapes and genre scenes. He painted many scenes with fishermen and fishing boats.
The Brussels Salon was a periodic exhibition of works by living artists that was held in Brussels between 1811 and 1914. It was primarily aimed at painters, but sculptors, draughtsmen, engravers and architects were also present. Participants were given a unique opportunity to present their work to the general public and to offer it for sale if desired. They could also enter anonymously in a competition whose first prize was a gold medal. The catalogues were eagerly received and newspapers and art critics followed the event closely. The national Museum of Fine Arts was enriched mainly by works purchased at the Salon.
