# VERBOECKHOVEN, Eugène-Joseph [View the canonical artist record]() ## Artist - Lifespan: 1798–? - Profession: painter - School: Belgian ## Biography Belgian painter and printmaker. The son of the sculptor Barthélemy Verboeckhoven \(1759-1840\) and brother of Louis-Charles Verboeckhoven, he began drawing as a young child. His initial desire to become a sculptor led him to produce a few models. In 1815 his family moved to Ghent, where he attended the Academie from 1816 to 1818, supported by the sculptor Albert Voituron \(1787-1847\) and later by a Ghent patron, Ferdinand Van der Haegen. From 1818 he was a pupil of Balthasar-Paul Ommeganck, from whom he imbibed the classical landscape tradition that informed the best of his own work, such as Landscape with Cattle and a Cowherd by a Tree \(1824; Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum\). Other works from this period, for example the Halting Place \(1826; private collection\), heralded a new realism in Verboeckhoven's work. He abandoned the human figure in order to produce prosaic but popular pictures of sheep, cattle and donkeys; these animals take on human characteristics in his work and are reminiscent of bourgeois portraits of the time. ## Related artworks - [Still-Life with a Hare]() ## Attribution [Web Gallery of Art]()