Master Art

While not generally known as a landscape artist, Henri Privat-Livemont often depicted elegant women, sometimes accompanied by children, in field and forest settings. He was particularly fond of painting in the Sonian (Soignes) Wood, an 11,000 acre forest on the southeastern edge of Brussels. As the art critic Charles Conrardy, writing on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition of Privat-Livemont’s work in a gallery in Brussels in 1919, noted, ‘His love of nature is easily demonstrated by his many paintings of the Forêt de Soignes. Whatever the season, he set up his easel under the beech groves, beside the ponds and in front of the rhododendron beds. With a light brush, he knows how to render the foliage gilded by autumn, trembling in the east wind; all in sylvan bloom in summer or awakening in the chosen spring.’