DOI Artikel:
Khnopff, Fernand: A great Belgian sculptor: Constantin Meunier
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.20712#0022
Constantin Meunier
Constantin Meunier is tar excellence, the painter,
and above all the sculptor of the working-man.
Without being guided by any systematic considera-
tions of literature or of politics, but led by an
instinct as potent as it was simple, he was the first
to perceive new elements of beauty in the deeper
strata of popular life, and he saw that it was his
business to make this known.
The fart of Meunier is a sincere expression of
beautiful pity or of compassionate beauty.
As M. Dumont-Wilden (one of our finest art-
critics) has justly written:—“This is an exact
picture of labouring humanity, the splendid pre-
sentment of the eternal struggle of man against
natural fatalities—that great dolorous drama which
is of all time, but that our times, with their huge
industries and congested, overheated centres of
work, see, perhaps, under a grander and more
terrible aspect than did bygone ages. To find an
element of beauty in the factory; to discover the
harmonious rhythm of a body beneath the miner’s
working-jacket; to conjure up the artistic emotion
which lurks beneath the rough exterior of a coron,
or in the dismal oppressiveness of an industrial
town : what a singular and gigantic task is this,
when one comes to think of it! What marvellous-
intuition in an artist whom destiny seems to have
formed expressly for this task ! And, indeed, the
life of Constantin Meunier, harmonious, sad and
simple, like one of his works, was but a slow
preparation for the splendid fruition of his later
years.”
Constantin Emile Meunier was born on April
12th, 1831, at Etterbeck, a suburb of Brussels.
“ His father, Louis,” writes M. J. Du Jardin in his im-
portant work, “IdArt Flamand,” “was a tax collector,
and his mother, nee Charlotte Filemont, had borne
her husband six children, three boys and three
girls. Shortly after the birth of the future artist
his father died. The resources of Mme. Meunier
were reduced to her widow’s pension, quite inade
quate for the bringing up of her children. She
owned a house in the Place du petit Sablon, and
she left Etterbeck to settle in the town. She there
opened a magasin de modes, let apartments, and
was thus able to think of the future without appre-
hension. Her young daughters (one of whom
married later the engraver Auguste Danse), were
“ies mineurs ”
4
(Photograph by P. Becker)
BY CONSTANTIN MEUNIER
Constantin Meunier is tar excellence, the painter,
and above all the sculptor of the working-man.
Without being guided by any systematic considera-
tions of literature or of politics, but led by an
instinct as potent as it was simple, he was the first
to perceive new elements of beauty in the deeper
strata of popular life, and he saw that it was his
business to make this known.
The fart of Meunier is a sincere expression of
beautiful pity or of compassionate beauty.
As M. Dumont-Wilden (one of our finest art-
critics) has justly written:—“This is an exact
picture of labouring humanity, the splendid pre-
sentment of the eternal struggle of man against
natural fatalities—that great dolorous drama which
is of all time, but that our times, with their huge
industries and congested, overheated centres of
work, see, perhaps, under a grander and more
terrible aspect than did bygone ages. To find an
element of beauty in the factory; to discover the
harmonious rhythm of a body beneath the miner’s
working-jacket; to conjure up the artistic emotion
which lurks beneath the rough exterior of a coron,
or in the dismal oppressiveness of an industrial
town : what a singular and gigantic task is this,
when one comes to think of it! What marvellous-
intuition in an artist whom destiny seems to have
formed expressly for this task ! And, indeed, the
life of Constantin Meunier, harmonious, sad and
simple, like one of his works, was but a slow
preparation for the splendid fruition of his later
years.”
Constantin Emile Meunier was born on April
12th, 1831, at Etterbeck, a suburb of Brussels.
“ His father, Louis,” writes M. J. Du Jardin in his im-
portant work, “IdArt Flamand,” “was a tax collector,
and his mother, nee Charlotte Filemont, had borne
her husband six children, three boys and three
girls. Shortly after the birth of the future artist
his father died. The resources of Mme. Meunier
were reduced to her widow’s pension, quite inade
quate for the bringing up of her children. She
owned a house in the Place du petit Sablon, and
she left Etterbeck to settle in the town. She there
opened a magasin de modes, let apartments, and
was thus able to think of the future without appre-
hension. Her young daughters (one of whom
married later the engraver Auguste Danse), were
“ies mineurs ”
4
(Photograph by P. Becker)
BY CONSTANTIN MEUNIER