Studio: international art (88.1924)

BRUSSELS

BRUSSELS.—The death of Emile Claus,
the great Belgian artist, is another cruel
loss for the country. 00a
Claus, who was nearly seventy-five years
old, and looked fifty, was the best repre-
sentative of that group of landscape
painters who, with A. J. Heymans, have
followed the influence of Claude Monet
and attempted to render the brightness of
the light, the atmospheric freshness of the
air more than the materiality of things. 0
At first Claus, who was a pupil of the
Academy at Antwerp, started his career
painting dark and brownish portraits. He
was very quickly well thought of and had
many decently paid commissions. Never-
theless he was early convinced that such
works, too much inspired by the old
masters, whose pictures had been darkened
by the years, were artificial. He felt that
life and nature only were worthy of being
rendered by his brushes. He deserted his
customers and comrades, and he became
an inhabitant of a little village called
Astene, along the river Lys, in Flanders.
There he began to paint that beautiful
series of views of meadows, gardens,

fields, streams, roads, seen at every time
of the day, at every moment of the season.
He became the painter of the sun and of
the moonlight, of the blue or of the grey
sky, of rain, of wind, of mist, of snow, of
dew, of fog more than the painter of earth,
trees, cottages, cattle or human beings in
the open fields, who seem to be his
subjects. 00000

In this second way of interpretation he
gained, after a few years, understanding
and admiration. Success came to him. His
paintings were purchased by famous col-
lectors and by public galleries. The museum
of Brussels has several of them. 0 0

Claus also travelled sometimes. He went
to Italy and stayed at Venice, to the South
of France, to Holland, and everywhere he
painted he tried with all his power to catch
on his canvas the glorious light and its
reflected shadows. 0000

It is well known that during the Great
War Claus was a refugee in London and
since 1919 he lived again in his house of
Astene on the Lys and worked as formerly.

His name and his works will remain and
never be forgotten in Belgium. P. L.