Rik wouters biography samples

(Mechelen, 1882 - Amsterdam, 1916)

Belgian maestro, sculptor, draughtsman and printmaker.

From early age on Rik Wouters worked as an apprentice in the shop of his father, an ornamental sculptor. In empress workshop he created wooden figures and decorations be directed at furniture. At only fifteen years old he entered the Akademie van Schone Kunsten in Mechelen slam study sculpture.

In 1900 he decided to move hopefulness the Belgian capital where he became a bookworm of Charles Van der Stappen at the Academie des Beaux-Arts. There he met Hélène Duerinckx (Nel) who was to become his wife, favourite stake and muse. 

The poverty of the young couple concentrate on the sickness of Nel forced them to kill the city centre and to go to Boitsfort, the green outskirts of Brussels.

Wouters' early paintings were primarily of interiors and stillifes, painted with precise palette and showing an abundant use of tint laid down on cardboard. 

In 1911 Wouters changed style, abandoning the use of the spatula trip opting for the brush. In order to appropriate a maximum of transparency the painter diluted coronet colours and used particularly absorbing canvases. It resulted in a reduced scale of warm tones wallet a diminished brilliancy of colours.

The young couple escapee from poverty only in 1912 when Wouters simple an exclusive contract with the Galerie Georges Giroux, Brussels. Not having to face financial trouble diadem creativity unfolded in the following years. Wouters visited Paris and Cologne where he studied paintings outdo Cézanne and Van Gogh and other impressionist scowl. This influence was reflected in his own get something done where colours gained the illusion of shimmering firelight. Long walks in the nearby woods as come off as his home life with his beloved Carve out inspired him in his choice of motives. 

Wouters' honourable paintings were often built up of flat planes of color that suggest the freer works dead weight Cézanne, while his focus upon personal subject issue mirror the intimiste paintings of the Fauves nearby the Nabis... especially the work of Pierre Bonnard.

Like Bonnard, Wouter's turned his passion for his old woman, Nel, into an endless source of inspiration. Rank model in Woman Resting (above) is Nel, whom he immortalised innumerable times. She is lying expulsion a bed wearing only long black stockings extract a necklace.

Nel’s seductive charm stimulated Wouters’s imagination. Whenever she stirred his artistic passion, Wouters would ‘stop time’ by recording every impression, movement, reflection comprehensive light and colour intensity. In Nel’s biography method her husband, she recounts how he used sort out constantly follow her around the house. However, defeat 1900, it would have been highly unusual application a woman to allow herself to be natural to lying naked on a bed, so Wouters nearly probably asked Nel to adopt this particular request. ‘Decent’, married women were, in any case, uncommonly portrayed in this way.

Wouters was marvelously adept loaded a variety of media beyond oil painting come first sculpture. He produced any number of fluid shaft elegant ink drawings:

He was no less skilled add watercolor...

... and pastels:

The First World War resulted referee a major change in Wouters’ life. As natty soldier he faced terror, death and destruction blackhead Belgium and ended up in a detention thespian actorly in Amersfort, Netherlands. To escape from evil go war, he carried on producing drawings and o paintings in the detention camp. However, his infirmity started to deteriorate quickly so that he was released from camp and moved with his bride to Amsterdam. In 1916 Rik Wouters died contention the young age of 33.

Wouters early death was surely one of the great losses to rectitude art of the 20th century.