Belgian painter, designer and sculptor, brother of the architect Octave Van Rysselberghe (1855-1929). He was enrolled in the Academie van Beeldende Kunsten in Ghent at an early age. In 1879 he became a pupil of Jean-François Portaels, director of the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, whose Orientalist works he admired. Van Rysselberghe first exhibited at the SalonGLOSSARYIn the French language of the 18th and 19th centuries it designated an actual exhibition space, as well as the academic art exhibitions staged in the Salon d'Apollon of the Louvre since 1667. From 1737, the exhibitions took place biennially and, after the French Revolution, annually in the Salon Carré of the Louvre in Paris. Towards the end of the 19th century the official Salon jury was dissolved in order to make way for a committee of state-approved artists, i.e. former Salon members, who created the highly influential Société des Artistes Français. in Brussels in 1881. The next year he won a travelling scholarship and, following in the footsteps of Portaels, visited Spain and Morocco. With fellow artists Darío de Regoyos and Constantin Meunier, Van Rysselberghe recorded picturesqueGLOSSARYTerm covering a set of attitudes towards landscape, both real and painted, that flourished in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It indicated an aesthetic approach that found pleasure in roughness and irregularity, and an attempt was made to establish it as a critical category between the 'beautiful' and the 'Sublime'. Picturesque scenes were thus neither serene (like the beautiful) nor awe-inspiring (like the Sublime), but full of variety, curious details, and interesting textures — medieval ruins were quintessentially Picturesque. Natural scenery tended to be judged in terms of how closely it approximated to the paintings of favoured artists such as Gaspard Dughet, and in 1801 the Supplement to Samuel Johnson's Dictionary by George Mason defined 'Picturesque as: 'what pleases the eye; remarkable for singularity; striking the imagination with the force of painting; to be expressed in painting; affording a good subject for a landscape; proper to take a landscape from.' The Picturesque Tour in search of suitable subjects was a feature of English landscape painting of the period, exemplified, for example, in the work of Girtin and (early in his career) of Turner, and the Picturesque generated a large literary output; much of it was pedantic and obsessive and it became a popular subject for satire. scenes of everyday life. He exhibited these Mediterranean pictures in 1883 at L'Essor. He attended the historic meeting on 28 October 1883 at which the avant-garde exhibition society Les XXGLOSSARYA group that began with 20 Belgian painters and sculptors as well as critics, founded to organize juryless exhibitions following their dissatisfaction with the selection process of the Brussels Academy and the Paris Salon. The group did not represent any one style, but exhibited works of Realism, Impressionism, Symbolism, and Art Nouveau, all together. The artist group played a significant role in the modernization of art in Belgium by inviting foreign artists as well to the exhibitions, including Whistler, Monet, and Renoir. The frequent participation of Signac and Seurat led to the development of an independent Belgian Neo-Impressionism with international flair.Important members of Les Vingts included, among others, James Ensor, Fernand Khnopff, Theo van Rysselberghe, and Henri van der Velde. The group dissolved itself in 1893 after holding a total of 126 exhibitions. was created, and at their exhibition in 1885 he showed the results of a second Moroccan trip, including the exotic Fantasia (Brussels, Musée Royal d'Art Moderne).
In 1886 the painter travelled with the poet Emile Verhaeren to Paris, where he met Georges Seurat whose painting he admired, particularly A Sunday Afternoon at the Island of Grande Jatte. Following his contact with Neo-Impressionists like Seurat, Signac, Cross and Pissarro in Paris, van Rysselberghe turned to PointillismGLOSSARYPainting style that appeared in France toward the end of the nineteenth century. The technique of the Neo-Impressionists of applying pure colours next to each other in order to create the actual colour only from a distance through optical mixing in the eye of the beholder was declared to be the supreme principle in painting by Georges Seurat, who rigorously developed it further by applying unbroken colours next to each other in a strict pattern of points or commas. This new technique, called Divisionism by Seurat, was exhibited to the public for the first time in 1884 in Paris at an exhibition of the Indépendents. himself, becoming the main exponent of the style in Belgium and one of Belgium's most important artists of the fin-de-siecle period. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, the painter travelled in Spain, North Africa, the Middle East and Europe. In 1898, he moved from Brussels to Paris where he joined the literary Symbolist group.
After the death of Georges Seurat, van Rysselberghe gradually abandoned the Pointillist technique and turned to a more Realist style. He was famous for his portraits of poets and other literary figures and created an oeuvreGLOSSARYThe complete body of works created by an artist. of etchings and lithographs. He also designed some beautiful various posters for bookshops and art galleries. Van Rysselberghe and his wife, who was fondly known as Madame Théo, are said to have played an important role in the life of André Gide. Between 1905-1910, he settled in Saint Clair in Provence, where he primarily executed portraits of his wife as well as of his daughter Elisabeth.
