Louis BUISSERET
(Binche 1888 - Brussels 1956)
Study of a Pensive Young Woman
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Pencil on buff paper, backed.
Signed and dated L. Buisseret / août 1912 at the lower left.
603 x 437 mm. (23 3/4 x 17 1/4 in.)
Signed and dated L. Buisseret / août 1912 at the lower left.
603 x 437 mm. (23 3/4 x 17 1/4 in.)
Louis Buisseret was greatly admired as a draughtsman. As his biographer wrote, ‘Much could be written about the perfection of the draughtsmanship of this master who never ceases to remember the lessons of the great Italians and those who, in our time, succeeded them.’ Similarly, the contemporary Belgian painter Jean Ransy noted of Buisseret that, ‘Drawing was for the painter from Hainault always the principal act, a generator of style and the touchstone of his intellectual probity...All of his paintings are thought out at length, with the love of a métier that he knew better than most of his contemporaries.’
Dated August 1912, the present sheet is an early work by the artist, executed the year after he won the Belgian Prix de Rome in the field of engraving.
Dated August 1912, the present sheet is an early work by the artist, executed the year after he won the Belgian Prix de Rome in the field of engraving.
Born in the Belgian province of Hainault, Louis Buisseret studied at the Académie in Mons with Emile Motte and Louis Joseph Greuse, before completing his artistic training at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in the studio of the Belgian Symbolist painter Jean Delville. He was awarded the second prize in the Belgian Prix de Rome painting competition of 1910, and the following year won the first prize in the category of printmaking. Buisseret’s time in Rome was of particular importance to his development, and the influence of Italian Renaissance painting, particularly the frescoes the artist saw in Florence and Rome, was to be reflected in his art for much of his later career. During the years of the First World War Buisseret painted mainly portraits. In 1928 he was one of the founding members of the Nervia group of artists, and the following year was appointed director of the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Mons, an institution that he continued to lead until 1949. Active mainly as a painter of portraits, nudes and still life subjects, Buisseret received several honours and prizes during his long career before his death in 1956, at the age of sixty-eight. Works by him are in numerous museums in Belgium, as well as in Barcelona, Madrid, Riga and Indianapolis; the last of these houses a group portrait of the artist’s family.