Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, April 4, 2022: Emile Claus, a Belgian painter (#1536)

Emile Claus (1849 –1924) was a Belgian painter.
Emile Claus was born in Sint-Eloois-Vijve, a village in West Flanders (Belgium), at the banks of the river Lys. Emile was the twelfth child in a family of thirteen. Father Alexander was a grocer-publican and for some time town councillor. Mother Celestine Verbauwhede came from a Brabant skipper’s family and had her hands full with her offspring.

As a child, Emile already loved drawing and on Sunday went three kilometres on foot to the Academy of Waregem (the neighbouring town) to learn how to draw. He graduated from the Academy with a gold medal. Although father Claus allowed him to take drawing classes, he did not fancy an artist's career for his son. Instead, he sent Emile as a baker’s apprentice to Lille (France). Emile learned French there but the job of a baker clearly did not appeal to him. He also worked for some time with the Belgian Railways and as a representative in the flax trade.

The urge to paint did not let go of Emile and he wrote a letter for help to the famous composer and musician Peter Benoit, who lived in nearby Harelbeke and was an occasional visitor of the family. Only with some effort, Peter Benoit managed to convince father Claus to allow his son to train at the Antwerp Academy of Fine Arts. Claus did have to pay for his studies himself though. After graduating, he stayed to live in Antwerp.

Artistically, Claus soon prospered. As a celebrity, he became a friend of the family with amongst others the French sculptor Auguste Rodin and the naturalist Émile Zola, and with the Belgian novelists and poets Cyriel Buysse, Emile Verhaeren, Pol de Mont and Maurice Maeterlinck. He travelled around the world to attend exhibitions of his work.

An important person in the life of Emile Claus was the painter Jenny Montigny. She followed master classes at his workshop in Astene and for years travelled back and forth between Ghent and Astene. Although Claus was 26 years older than she was, they began a relationship that would last until Claus' death. Another of his private students was the Belgian artist Anna De Weert. She, and her husband Maurice De Weert [nl], spent summers with him in the 1890s.

The First World War interrupted Claus' international success. He fled to London where he found a house and workshop at the banks of the river Thames. He returned in 1918.

In 1882 Claus had completed Cock Fight in Flanders, The realistic painting portrays the dignitaries of Waregem, collected around a small arena with two fighting roosters.

Artistically and financially, Claus soon prospered. The Antwerp Museum of Fine Arts purchased one of his works, and The Picknick (1887), his well-known painting showing a farmer’s family watching the Sunday outing of the urban bourgeoisie on the opposite bank of a small river (the Lys), was bought by the Belgian Royal Family.

Under the influence of Claude Monet, he developed a style that has been characterized as luminism. In 1904, he started the artist group Vie et Lumière ('Life and Light').

In 1918, at his return from London after World War I and with the dawn of expressionism, Claus found his fame diminished. In 1921, he was given a last survey exhibition in Brussels, where especially his London works (about the city and the river Thames) made a positive impression on the public.

Stimulated by his friend, the author Camille Lemonnier, and influenced by the French impressionists, like Claude Monet whose works he got to know during his trips to Paris in the 1890s, Claus gradually shifted from naturalistic realism to a very personal style of impressionism called 'luminism', because of the luminous palette he used.

The Beet Harvest shows farmers harvesting sugar beets, hacking them out of the frozen field. The painting is gigantic in size and hangs at the Museum of Deinze and de Leiestreek in Deinze, Belgium. Claus never sold it and after his death, his widow donated it to the city of Deinze on the condition they built a museum to exhibit it. The painting can now indeed be found at the Museum van Deinze en de Leiestreek (museum of Deinze and the Lys area') in Deinze (Belgium).

The Ice Birds (1891) shows an icy landscape with playing children. The painting was inspired by the novella of the same title by the Waregem novelist Léonce Ducatillon. The naturalistic story is set at the Keukelmeersen ('keukel meadows'), a swampy area with dips, drains, ditches and trenches near the centre of Waregem.

Every winter, it got flooded and changed into a wide icy plain. At the end of the story, one of the poor hungry boys falls through the ice while trying to pull out a frozen fish, and drowns. The painting is now part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent (Belgium).
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