VERBOECKHOVEN, Eugène-Joseph

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 initialGLOSSARYthe first letter of the text in medieval manuscripts and early printed books, made to stand out emphatically by its colour, size, and ornamentation. 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 classicalGLOSSARYRelating to the culture of ancient Greece and Rome (classical Antiquity). The classical world played a profoundly important role in the Renaissance, with Italian scholars, writers, and artists seeing their own period as the rebirth (the "renaissance") of classical values after the Middle Ages. The classical world was considered the golden age for the arts, literature, philosophy, and politics. Concepts of the classical, however, changed greatly from one period to the next. Roman literature provided the starting point in the 14th century, scholars patiently finding, editing and translating a wide range of texts. In the 15th century Greek literature, philosophy and art - together with the close study of the remains of Roman buildings and sculptures-expanded the concept of the classical and ensured it remained a vital source of ideas and inspiration. 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 realismGLOSSARYRealism (with an upper case "R"), also known as the Realist school, denotes a mid-nineteenth century art movement and style in which artists discarded the formulas of Neoclassicism and the theatrical drama of Romanticism to paint familiar scenes and events as they actually looked. Typically it involved some sort of sociopolitical or moral message, in the depiction of ugly or commonplace subjects. One of the main representatives and spokesmen was the painter Gustave Courbet. In the dispute about ways to represent reality, Realism rebelled against the idealistic and classicist tendencies in painting. 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.