Théo van Rysselberghe

Biography

In the winter of 1887 Théo van Rysselberghe travelled to Meknès with a Belgian economic mission. He went along as its draughtsman: three months later he came back with a portrait of Sultan Hassan I and with coloured pencil sketches. It was already his third journey to Morocco.

He was born on 23 November 1862 in Ghent, into a prosperous French-speaking family. His father was a joiner. Three older brothers went into science and architecture, and one of them, Octave, later built a house for him. Théo studied first at the Academy of Ghent, then from 1879 at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels under Jean-François Portaels, whose North African pictures had started a fashion for Orientalism in Belgium. In 1881, at nineteen, he exhibited for the first time at the Brussels Salon; before that he had shown two portraits at the Ghent Salon. In 1882, with his friend Frantz Charlet and the Spanish painter Darío de Regoyos, he travelled through Spain, where in Madrid he copied and studied the old masters and in Seville met Constantin Meunier. At the end of October that year he landed at Tangier and stayed four months. He drew street cobblers, an Arab boy, a guard at rest, the market and the kasbah. About thirty of these works he showed in Ghent, and the success was immediate. It was then that he befriended the poet Émile Verhaeren, whom he would portray many times.

In the autumn of 1883 he went to Haarlem to see how light is handled in Frans Hals, and met the American William Merritt Chase there. On 28 October 1883 he became one of the founders of the Brussels group Les XX, whose secretary was the lawyer Octave Maus. From Tangier, where he returned in November, van Rysselberghe corresponded with Maus for a year and pressed him to invite Meunier, Alfred Verwee and Chase to the first exhibition. In April 1884 he toured Andalusia with John Singer Sargent and Ralph Curtis. The best-known work of this period is the large “Arabian Phantasia”, bathed in the harsh light of the Moroccan sun; at the second exhibition of Les XX in 1885 he showed it among other pictures. The money ran out, and at the end of October 1884 he went back to Belgium.

His portraits of 1884–1886 are painted in subdued tones: black and purple gradations set against light patches. At the Les XX exhibition of 1886 he saw Monet and Renoir and tried the Impressionist manner, and the same year in Paris he came to know Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”. Together with Henry van de Velde, Georges Lemmen, Anna Boch and others, he brought this technique to Belgium. Seurat was invited to Brussels in 1887, and the critics received his painting with hostility. Over this, a long conflict began between van Rysselberghe and James Ensor.

The Meknès journey produced several pictures in which Seurat’s influence is evident: “Nomad Encampment”, “Caravan in the Mountains”, “Gate of Mansour-El-Hay”. The brushwork in them is still short strokes, not dots. When he finished these canvases he left the Moroccan theme behind and turned to portraiture. The portrait of Alice Sèthe (1888), in blue and gold, is painted with dots alone; Alice’s sister Maria later married Van de Velde. In 1889 van Rysselberghe married Marie Monnom. In Paris he met Theo van Gogh, and as a result Vincent van Gogh received an invitation to the Brussels exhibition.

He painted in a Pointillist manner from about 1890 to 1910. Some of the canvases of the 1890s are landscapes and seascapes: the Scheldt, Sète, the dunes at Cadzand, “The Rainbow”. In 1895, for posters for the sleeping-car company, the Compagnie des Wagons-Lits, he travelled to Athens, Constantinople, Hungary, Romania and Russia; from this series the poster “Royal Palace Hotel, Ostende” (1899) is known. At the same time he illustrated Verhaeren and decorated the catalogues of Les XX with initials and arabesques. In 1897 he moved to Paris, where, with Paul Signac, Maximilien Luce and Camille Pissarro, he published drawings in the anarchist magazine Les Temps Nouveaux.

“The Reading” (1903) shows friends gathered at Verhaeren’s: Gide, Maeterlinck, Cross and others. It seems that no such meeting ever took place; the picture was put together from earlier profile sketches. To my mind, this is the best explanation of how he understood a portrait: as a scene of company, not a record.

He found Picasso of the Blue Period, by his own account, “ugly and uninteresting”.

After 1903 the dots became freer, and by 1910 he had abandoned them altogether. His stroke grew longer, and colour and contrasts sharper. He spent his last years in Saint-Clair on the Mediterranean coast, where his friend Henri-Edmond Cross already lived; the house was built in 1911 by Octave van Rysselberghe. From 1905 female nudes predominated in his large canvases (“After the Bath”, 1910), and in 1910 he received a commission for decorative panels for the villa of the Nocard family in Neuilly. Later he also took up sculpture: a bronze head of André Gide.

Van Rysselberghe died in Saint-Clair on 14 December 1926 (by other accounts, 13 December). He was buried in the cemetery at Le Lavandou, beside Cross. In 1919 he had been made a Commander of the Order of Leopold.