Venezia

Théo van Rysselberghe (Ghent, November 23, 1862 - Le Lavandou, December 13, 1926) was a Belgian painter, one of the major Belgian representatives of pointillism. He was the youngest son of François Vanrysselberghe (1820-1893), carpenter and entrepreneur of Ghent, and brother of Octave Van Rysselberghe, architect. Finished his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent and Brussels, under the direction of Jean-François Portaels, in 1881 he participated for the first time in an exhibition at the Salon in Brussels. Two years later, together with his friend Octave Maus, he was one of the founders of the avant-garde group Les XX (The Twenty), an association that had replaced the previous group of artists La Chrysalide. In 1887 he discovered the works of Georges Seurat and became fascinated with the Divisionist technique; but by the end of the century he replaced the pointillism of his paintings with compositions with a broader touch, with wide elongated strips of color. As Seurat and Signac painted many seascapes and made engravings, although the latter are much less known. Théo went to Morocco three times, fascinated by the colors and the North African environment. The first trip, in the footsteps of Jean-François Portaels, began with a long visit to Spain, in the company of his friend Franz Charlet and the Spanish painter Darío de Regoyos. He was able to admire the works of the "old masters", exhibited at the Prado Museum and in Seville he met Constantin Meunier, who was executing a copy of Pedro de Campaña's Descent from the Cross. From this trip he brought back several portraits, including: Spanish Woman (1881), La Sivigliana (1882), which already showed a very different style. When he arrived in Tangier, at the end of October 1882, a new world opened up before his eyes, so close to Europe and yet so enormously different. He stayed in Morocco for four months, drawing and painting picturesque scenes, caught on the street, in the kasbahs and souks: Cobbler on the street (1882), Arab Boy (1882), Rest of a Guard (1883) and other paintings. Back in Belgium he showed about thirty works, made during the trip, to the "Literary Artistic Circle" of Ghent: were appreciated, in particular, the paintings: The Kef smokers, The seller of oranges, Seascape at sunset and Tangiers. In 1883 he exhibited scenes of Mediterranean life at the Salon de L'Essor in Brussels. In that period he made friends with the writer and poet Émile Verhaeren and in September of the same year he went to Haarlem, to study the light of the works of Frans Hals. The exact rendering of light will in fact for him, from those days onwards, a constant concern. In Haarlem he met the American painter William Merritt Chase. His long friendship with Paul Signac was significant, even politically, suggesting ideas libertarian and anarchist, so that, among other initiatives, participated in the adventure of the anarchist newspaper Les Temps nouveaux, for which he made several illustrations. In 1889 he married the Belgian writer Maria Monom, just twenty-three years old, with whom he had a daughter the following year. Maria lived long and died at 93 years old, in 1959. In about 1898 he settled in Provence, near the sea, in Saint-Clair, a hamlet of Le Lavandou, in the department of Var, and in this last period his painting returned towards a certain form of neoclassicism. His daughter Élisabeth, after having had a child, Catherine, by the writer André Gide, married the novelist Pierre Herbart of Dunkirk, in 1931. Van Rysselberghe died at 64 years old, in Saint-Clair and was buried in Lavandou cemetery, near his friend painter Henri-Edmond Cross. The portraits made by Van Rysselberghe were mainly dedicated to relatives, including that of Alice Sèthe, in which the artist took great care of the details of the furniture behind the figure, which contrasted with the spirit of synthesis, typical of French pointillists. For his part, Émile Verhaeren noted how Van Rysselberghe's figures lacked the hieraticism that distinguished Seurat's figures. In addition to Post-Impressionism, Van Rysselberghe was similarly influenced by Japanism and, in particular, admired the work of Hiroshige Utagawa. While his seascapes moved toward simplification, his portraits abounded in detail. Van Rysselberghe also painted a good number of female nudes, which were his favorite subject matter, beginning in 1910; this period of Van Rysselberghe's art coincided with the transition from the phase of post-impressionist influence to that of a newfound classicism. Théo Van Rysselberghe was also an illustrator and decorator of books, such as the 1895 collection The Almanac of Émile Verhaeren, in which he designed ornaments, arabesques and text illustrations. Likewise, he decorated exhibition catalogs of the Les XX group.