Artworks

 Leon Frédéric drew on contemporary and earlier influences as well as on his

own personal spiritual views of life and nature to evolve a unique artistic style.

Working during a period when Impressionism and its offspring Divisionism and

Post-Impressionism were the main currents of avant-garde art, Frédéric’s

idiosyncratic realism comes as a considerable surprise.

Frédéric studied briefly under Charle-Albert before attending the Académie

Royal des Beaux-arts in Brussels, where he became a pupil of Jules

Vankeirsblick (1833-96) and Ernest Slingeneyer (1820-94). He also worked in

the studio of Jean-François Portaels (1818-1895).

The tenor of Frédéric’s work was formed largely by the Italian and Flemish art

of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the poetic paintings of the English

Pre-Raphaelites. A two-year sojourn in Italy (1876-78) which included visits to

Venice, Florence, Naples and Rome, exposed Frédéric to the works of the Italian

Renaissance. This experience conveyed to the painter the profound beauty of

nature with its artistic disposition toward harmony, and the inherent nobility of

mankind. This sense of harmony was balanced by a personal artistic vision

which conveyed a truthfulness to nature which was reinforced by Flemish and

German Old Master painters who had studied directly their natural surroundings.

Both Italian and Northern Renaissance schools depicted the natural world

through clear, detailed compositions, and their influence infuses Frédéric’s work

with a lucid and unaffected honesty. In his symbolist designs, including his

various large multi-paneled Cycles of Life , Frédéric attempts to unify Christian

mysticism with the current social conditions of the working class. The

landscapes included in many of these compositions take delight in a pantheistic

communion with nature.

Following his stay in Rome, Frédéric made his debut at the Brussels Salon in

1878. He then became a member of the Brussels-based association L’Essor , a

group of young artists who wanted to paint contemporary social reality instead

of using imaginary or literary themes as their artistic starting point.

Subsequently, his work was exhibited in Ghent, Liège, Munich, Nice and Paris.

He was awarded gold medals for painting at the Exposition Universelle of 1889

and 1900, and in 1929, together with James Ensor, Frédéric was created a baron.

Many of Frédéric’s early works show poor people and peasants, especially after

1883, when the artist moved from Brussels to Nafraiture, a small village in the

Ardennes region of Belgium where he lived for several years.

The present portrait was painted in the Ardennes in 1896. As often is the case in

Frédéric’s compositions from the mid 1890’s, social realism cloaks a strong

orientation toward hidden symbolism bound to a Christian mysticism still

present in the Belgian countryside. These forces formed the basis for Frédéric’s

profound involvement with naturalism, which conformed with ideas developed

at the same moment by critics such as Camill Lemonnier (1844-1913), a

member of the Symbolist La Jeune Belgique  group in Brussels, and earlier by

John Ruskin (1819-1900) in England. This naturalism brings with it a portrayal

of an austere life and the misfortunes of poverty, which were understood to be

the result of industrial modernity. In Frédéric’s work there is no sense of revolt,

but a curious resignation, where both poverty and social reform remain accepted

through faith.

The present realistic portrait is a superb work by Frédéric. The young girl with

her tilted head and slightly turned face set against the rural background provides

a powerful and mysterious visual effect. Although the model has not been

identified beyond the title “La petite Ardennaise,” she bears a resemblance to

Hélène Wauters, the daughter of the painter Emile Wauters. Frédéric had

painted a portrait of her as very young girl in 1891. (fig. 1) The sitter’s pose is

also reminiscent of the young girl standing at the left, holding a dark

earthenware pitcher, in the central panel of The Ages of the Working Man  (1900-

01), now at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. (fig. 2)

It is difficult to see the connection between Frédérics early naturalist works and

his later Symbolist allegories. How do we reconcile the realism of a painting

like La petite Ardennaise  with the almost surreal qualities of, for example,

Summer , painted in 1894 (fig. 3), one of the four panels of the Four Seasons  in

the Philadelphia Museum of Art? Its bright, almost psychedelic colors seem far

removed from the earthy tones of Frédéric’s earlier works; its idealized body

different from their realistic figures, and its lack of spatial qualities unlike their

pronounced perspective. The radical transformation of Frédéric’s style was not

an unusual phenomenon, however, among the artists of his generation.

Numerous artists born in the 1850s – Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret in France, Jan

Toorop in the Netherlands, and Edvard Munch in Scandinavia, to name only a

few, went through a similar stylistic change in the late 1880s, as they became

increasingly attracted to, and involved with, the Symbolist movement. In

Frédéric’s case however, it was the form rather than the content of his works

that changed. Themes like the cycle of life and its inherent contrasts – youth

and old age, life and death – continued to be a major inspiration throughout his

entire career.

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