Jef Leempoels

Leempoels painted in many genres, including portraits, genre paintings, nudes, history paintings, landscapes, vedute and still lifes.^[1]

The works of Leempoels are academic in their execution. His style is realistic and sometimes even hyper-realistic.^[3] His painstaking attention to detail explains his limited output. An article about the artist dated 1905 reported that the artist claimed only to complete three to four paintings a year because of his precise technique.^[15]

While he painted many society portraits he also created scenes of social realism depicting persons from the upper as well as the working classes, which show an insight into his subjects. Leempoels had an idealistic view of the role of the artist and expressed the opinion that it is the artist’s mission to make the world better or wiser. Art should therefore possess more than beauty and also express an idea and have a philosophical meaning.^[15][16] This explains some of his paintings with titles such as 'Vision, cruel vision, why have you frightened me so often during the nights of my childhood? Why?'^[16] Paintings with such philosophical intent include the painting Destiny and Humanity referred to above as well as the composition entitled Friendship (c. 1896, National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires). The iconography of the painting is derived from José de Ribera’s painting of a married couple entitled The Bearded Woman (1631, preserved in the Hospital de Tavera). Leempoels not only copied the facial features but also the gestures of the woman and her husband. Leempoels updated the clothing of the two figures, reversed the couple's position and diluted the reference to the original inspiration by not showing a naked breast nursing the child. The quotation by Leempoels of Ribera's original composition was not noticed by the contemporary reception. The work is understood to constitute two male portraits. When the painting was exhibited in 1897 at the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts, it was described by an art critic as two portraits in one canvas of two male friends of the same age, whose "physiognomy displays average intelligence" and who hold hands as a "sign of an indissoluble communion of feeling".^[17] Present-day views of the picture have emphasised the difficulty in interpreting representations of male bonding such as the one in Friendship.^[18]

The works of Leempoels, including some of his most famous paintings such as Destiny and Humanity, are mainly held in private collections. The current location of many of his works is unknown and some works are only known from contemporary black-and-white reproductions in magazines and exhibition catalogues. Only a few museum collections include examples of Leempoels' works. This may have contributed to his current relative obscurity.

About Destiny and Humanity, his work was showcased in the London British Periodical The Athenaeum, in 1897, with the following written by André Michel: A painter who by the energetic precision of his design and the uncompromising character of his realism reveals himself readily as Van Eyck's countryman, M. Jef Leempoels, has for several years made himself notable for pictures in which a moral idea always riot lies forms and colours which are full of vigorous precision, but intensely crude. Here is his idea this year how to symbolize Destiny and Humanity (Champ de Mars, 777). Above, in a sky whose gloomy radiance seems to shut in rather than light up the horizon, appears, as at a window, a figure at once hackneyed and unmoved; below, from the foreground to the infinite distance at the back, hands are stretched towards her : hands of menace, of prayer, hands entwined in the grasp of love or suffering, armed hands of the desperate, closed fists of the proletariat, gloved hands of cardinals, puckered hands of fetish-worshippers— all times, all conditions, all religions, all races, are represented by these millions of hands all lifted towards inexorable Destiny, whose wide-open eyes are fixed afar off above them, and see them not. Say what you like against the arrangement and the taste of a picture like this, the man who drew with a will so patient and so strong these hands (which Albert Durer would have looked at with respect) interests and moves me.^[19]

In France, the 1922 Larousse dictionary categorized Jef Leempoels as follows: Belgian painter, born in Brussels in 1867, composed iconic paintings in an archaic style ^[20]

The following works are in museums, but not all are on public display: “Les Éplorés / Die Weinenden / The Weeping” (Belvedère, Vienna); “Amitié / Amistad / Friendship" (MNBA, Buenos Aires); "l’Ergoteur / El Ergotista / The Critter” (MNBA, Santiago de Chile); “Portrait of Miss Ana-Maria Heber-Garcia” (MNAD, Montevideo); Self-portrait "The painter and his wife" (Broodhuis, Brussels); "Portrait of Mayor Adolphe Max" (Broodhuis, Brussels).

Media related to Jef Leempoels at Wikimedia Commons