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Eugène Verboeckhoven (1798 - Warneton - 1881 - Brussels)
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Biography
Son of the sculptor Barthélemy Verboeckhoven (1759–1840), Eugene Joseph Verboeckhoven began drawing as a young child. His initial desire to become a sculptor led him to produce a few models (e.g. Lion and Tiger). 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.
In 1827 Verboeckhoven moved to Brussels with his family, and the following year, while travelling through Germany and the Netherlands, he discovered the work of Paulus Potter, which was a turning-point in his career. Returning to Brussels, he was involved in the successful struggle for Belgian independence. He was made director of the Musée de Bruxelles by the provisional government, and, thanks to his initiative, the pictures in Antwerp Cathedral, including those by Peter Paul Rubens, were saved when the town came under fire in 1832. He became a teacher at the Académie Royale in Brussels in 1845, and his pupils there included Louis-Pierre Verwée (1807–77) and his son Alfred Jacques Verwée, and the brothers Charles Tschaggeny (1815–94) and Edmond Tschaggeny (1818–73). Aside from his own large body of work, Verboeckhoven frequently added staffage to landscapes by, among others, Jean-Baptiste De Jonghe, Henri Van Assche, Barend Cornelis Koekkoek and Louis-Pierre Verwée.
Verboeckhoven’s work developed little after 1840, and his pictures clearly lack direct observation of nature. Sometimes he took more trouble than usual over royal commissions, such as the portrait of Queen Louise’s Dog or one of Leopold I’s favourite animals, and on occasion he produced striking, if improbable, scenes of feline combat against a theatrical backdrop, for example the Ferocious Fight between the White Horse and the Roaring Lion.
Verboeckhoven produced some 53 etchings (e.g. Joseph Prudhomme) and, following a visit to London to see the royal menagerie, published Animaux remarquables de la menagerie (1825).
Collections
Verboeckhoven is represented in the following collections: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Musée d’Art Ancien, Brussels; Oudheidkundig Museum van de Bijloke, Ghent; Musee de la Dynastie, Brussels, amongst others. |
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