Anna Boch

Biography

In the spring of 1890, at the exhibition of Les XX in Brussels, Van Gogh’s painting “The Red Vineyard” was bought by Anna Boch, who was herself taking part in the same exhibition as a painter.

She was born on 10 February 1848 in Saint-Vaast, in Hainaut (in Russia she is sometimes said to have been born in La Louvière, where the family lived). She was the eldest daughter of Victor Boch, one of the founders of the Royal Boch faience works in La Louvière and a relative of the owners of Villeroy & Boch. Her younger brother Eugène also became a painter; Octave Maus, the lawyer who organised Les XX, was (according to some accounts) her cousin. She began drawing as a child, on holidays on the Belgian coast. She started systematic study in Brussels, where the family moved in the 1870s: first with Pierre-Louis Kuhnen, then with Euphrosine Beernaert. The decisive teacher was Isidore Verheyden, who from 1876 took her to paint outdoors, in the Sonian Forest and around Tervuren. Under his influence her palette grew lighter and her brushwork bolder. With him and her brother she travelled to the Kempen in the province of Limburg. Her first solo exhibition took place at the Cercle artistique et littéraire in Brussels in 1884 or 1885, and in 1885 she showed a canvas at the Paris Salon.

In 1885 or 1886 she joined Les XX, the avant-garde group, and remained its only woman member; she took part in all its exhibitions. There she grew close to Théo van Rysselberghe, and under his influence she was drawn to Pointillism for several years: works of this kind were shown at the group’s exhibition in 1889. In that year Van Rysselberghe painted her portrait in a Neo-Impressionist manner. Later the technique came to feel constraining, and she returned to a freer, broader brushstroke. When Les XX dissolved, she exhibited with La Libre Esthétique, founded by the same Maus.

From 1886 Boch lived in Brussels, in Saint-Gilles, and in 1905 she moved into a new town house in Ixelles, decorated, so it is written, with the participation of Victor Horta and Maurice Denis; the building has been demolished. The house was a meeting place: she held musical evenings, attended by Eugène Ysaÿe, and she herself played the piano, the organ and the violin.

She collected boldly. Her collection included Gauguin, Seurat, Signac, Ensor and Van Gogh. The Van Gogh painting is often called the only one he sold in his lifetime; that view is disputed. In 1891 she bought another canvas from him and sold it in 1907. In 1927 she gave the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium James Ensor’s “Russian Music” (1881), in which she is shown at the piano.

Around 1900 Boch travelled a great deal: France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Germany, Greece, Morocco (the lists of countries differ between sources). In 1906 she went with Van Rysselberghe to Veere, in Zeeland. She brought back landscapes and seascapes, such as “Coast of Brittany” (about 1901). In 1903 she was made a Knight of the Order of Leopold, and in 1928 an Officer of the same order. She belonged to the circle Vie et Lumière, founded in 1904 around Emile Claus, and in 1911 she was among the founders of the Galerie Lyceum, a Brussels association of women artists.

After the First World War her manner became denser and more contrasting, her colours harsher; to Fauvism, as scholars see it, she only came close. She last took part in an exhibition in 1934. In 1928 a book written together with Paul Colin appeared, and in 1930 the Galerie Georges Giroux in Brussels held a retrospective.

She died in February 1936 in Ixelles (on 25 February according to some sources, on the 23rd according to others) and is buried in the cemetery there. After her death her collection was sold at auction and, under her will, the proceeds went to pensions for needy fellow artists; some works went to a museum in Brussels, among them Gauguin, Seurat and Signac. About 140 of her paintings went to her goddaughter Ida van Haelewijn, the gardener’s daughter, and in some of them she is shown as a child in the garden. In 1968 they were bought by Boch’s great-nephew Luitwin von Boch.