Louis Gallait
Louis Gallait (born March 10, 1810 in Tournai , † November 20, 1887 in Schaerbeek near Brussels ) was a Belgian painter and draftsman . Together with Edouard de Bièfve, he is considered the founder of the new Belgian history painting .
Gallait's art had a great influence on romantic painting in Germany.
Life
Gallait was a student of the art academy of his hometown and its director Philippe Augustin Hennequin , where he learned the representation of solemn events. In 1832 he won first prize at an exhibition in Ghent with his picture Prayer for the Emperor, what is the Emperor's . He went to Antwerp to continue his studies in Mathieu Ignace van Brée's studio . With his help, Gallait created his work Christ Healing a Blind Man ; a commissioned work for the cathedral in Tournai .
After studying the works of Rubens and van Dyck in Antwerp , he continued his studies in Paris . Here he soon made a name for himself as a portrait painter ; but his works with genre and historical depictions also met with great acclaim, such as B. Montaigne visits Tasso in prison .
Over time, Gallait occupied himself more and more with historical topics, which he tried to portray in a romantic-dramatic way. He painted the battle of Mont-Cassel for the historical museum of Versailles . In other circles he became known for his large painting The abdication of Charles V . After a pause in the production of larger historical pictures , during which Gallait provided some portraits and genre representations, he came back to the public in 1848 with an important picture of Egmond's Preparation for Death , which surpassed the previous one in terms of masterly technique. Equally energetic were his storming Antioch (1849) and the large, deep and moving painting The Corpses of Egmond and Hoorn (1851), which marked the high point of his artistic work.
In 1852, a very appealing genre painting, Gallait's A Young Slavic Musician with his sister at the Berlin exhibition, met with great applause. More admiration aroused by the astonishing technology than by the deeper thought content A resting gypsy with her two children (1852), Count Egmond's Last Moments (1858, Berlin National Gallery) and Tasso in prison .
Since then, Gallait's importance has declined; The works, portraits and the groups: War and Peace exhibited in Munich in 1869 and in Vienna in 1873 showed a decline in its strength until it took off again in 1882 with the painting of the Plague by Tournai (bought for 120,000 francs for the Brussels Museum). The prisoner's family , which Gallait brought to the exhibition in 1855, was full of deep emotion .
He was buried in the south cemetery in Tournai ( Cimetière du sud de Tournai ).
Memberships
- Academy of Fine Arts Munich
- Academy of Arts (Berlin)
- Art Academy Brussels
- Académie des Beaux-Arts , Paris, external member since 1870
Honors
- Order of Pour le Mérite
- Knight of the French Legion of Honor
Works (selection)
- Prayer to the emperor, what is to the emperor (1832)
- The abdication of Charles V (1841, Royal Museums of Fine Arts , Brussels )
- Christ healing a blind man
- Wandering musicians and beggars (in the Liège Museum ),
- Job on the straw bed
- Montaigne's visit to Tasso in prison .
- Johanna the madwoman
- The rifle guild of Brussels at the parade bed of Egmond and Hoorn
- The widow with her children on the beach
- Murillo , finding the motif for his Madonna
- Vargas before Alba
- Alba, signing death sentences (1863)
literature
- Anton Teichlein: Louis Gallait and painting in Germany. An episode from modern art history . Verlag Kaiser, Munich 1853.
- Serge Le Bailly de Tilleghem: La formation néo-classique d'un maître romantique: Louis Gallait à l'Académie de Tournai, Analysis de dessins inédits. In: Revue des archéoloques et historiens d'art de Louvain 9 , 1976, pp. 170–203
- Serge Le Bailly de Tilleghem (ed.): Louis Gallait (1810-1887), le gloire d'un romantique . Musée des Beaux-Arts de Tournai, Brussels 1987, ISBN 2-87193-047-3 .
- Wolf Stadler u. a .: Lexicon of Art 5th Gal - Mr. Karl Müller, Erlangen 1994, ISBN 3-86070-452-4 , p. 5
- Rainer Schoch : The “Belgian Pictures”. A dispute of principles in history painting of the 19th century. In: Karl Möseneder , Ed .: Dispute over pictures. From Byzantium to Marcel Duchamp . Reimer, Berlin 1997, ISBN 9783496011699 , pp. 161-180.
Web links
- Short biography in the database of the Munich Pinakothek
- Vita on the website of the Order Pour le Mérite
- Images about history and images of history
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Gallait, Louis |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Gallait, Louis-Joseph |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Belgian painter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 10, 1810 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Tournai |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 20, 1887 |
| Place of death | Schaerbeek |