Artists

Adriaan Josef Heymans
Belgian, 1839-1921

Adriaan Joseph Heymans was a Belgian landscape and genre painter, who also painted seascapes as well as watercolors. He was a student at the Koninklijke Acadamie voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp.  He became the prime mover of the Kalmthoutse School in Belgium, also known as the Ecole du Gris and then the Termonde school.  He was one of the founder members of the Societe Libre des Beaux Arts in Brussels, the Groupe des Vingt (Group of Twenty), L’Art Contemporrain and the art society Vie et Lumiere (Life and Light). During a stay in France from 1855 to 1858 he was influenced by the painters Rousseau, Corot, Daubigny and Millet and more generally by the Barbizon School whose theories he promulgated in Belgium.

 

During the 1960’s he developed rapidly in the direction of independent kind of Pre-Impressionism which led him towards a very personal Luminism.  He painted landscapes using the technique of ‘touche divisee’ working with hatching and small brushstrokes juxtaposed with colors so light as to be almost white and broken shades with a particular liking for capturing fleeting impressions of the union of sea and sky.  He also painted sheep in the landscape of the Campine region.

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