Jean de la Hoese

Jean de la Hoese (1846, in Brussels – 1917) was a Belgian painter of portraits, landscapes and genre scenes.

DE la HOESE Jean - LE BILLET DE FAVEUR - Berko Fine Paintings

Training and Career

De la Hoese's father worked as a graphic designer at the Militair Kartografisch Instituut.

Jean De la Hoese was a pupil of Auguste De Keyser (1859) and from 1859 until 1870 of the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts. His early works were very academic, but later on he evolved to a freer style.

This painter of aristocratic female beauty was a master portrait painter who depicted several masterpieces, including the portrait of his father which is exhibited in the Brussels Royal Museum of Fine Arts.

De la Hoese painted landscapes and genre scenes with elegant ladies in interiors (at the beginning of his career with an emphasis on the representation of fabrics, in the line of Florent Willems). Most of his portraits are presentations of important members of Belgium's higher social classes and highly educated. They express an exceptional unconventional liveliness. The Belgian government commissioned him to paint the posthumously portrait of the Belgian Queen Louise-Marie for the Palais de la Nation, the seat of the Belgian Federal Parliament.

We admire in De la Hoese the great simplicity of means he used to render the life of his models. There is nothing theatrical in the posture but it tries to fix the most familiar attitude; this is never what might be called a studio posture. And what a fine craftmanship, what a restrained yet bold brush!

Jean De la Hoese lived at 66 Warmoesstraat (rue Potagère) in Brussels (Sint-Joost-ten-Node).

Exhibitions

• 1888, Paris, Exposition Universelle
• 1894, Munich, Glaspalast, World Exposition
• 1907, Paris, Salon d’automne (“Portrait of Mrs A. Desenfans”, “Portraitt of Mr Léonce Evrard”)
• 1908, Berlin, Exhibition of Belgian Artists (“Portrait of the Artist's Father”)

Trivia

• Name of the street in 1080 Brussels.

Museums

• Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium
• Brussels, Museum of Elsene
• Brussels, Charlier Museum
• Gotha, Schlossgalerie (“The Visit”)
• Leuven, Stedelijk Museum

Literature

• P. & V. Berko, "Dictionary of Belgian Painters born between 1750 and 1875", Knokke 1981, p. 185-186.
• U. Thieme en F. Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, 17, Leipzig (Seemann Verlag), 1924.
• Le dictionnaire des peintres belges du XIV° siècle à nos jours, Brussels, 1994.
• Eugène De Seyn, Dictionnaire biographique des sciences, des lettres et des arts en Belgique, Tome I, Brussels, 1935, p. 272.