Inspiration and the pose - preparatory photographs by Jacques de Lalaing, circa 1884-1914

 

Jacques de Lalaing was a painter and, even more, a sculptor. These preparatory photographs, all now in the collection of the Rijksmuseum, were taken during different sessions but using the same model. I have no idea what works the studies may have contributed to; perhaps a scholar of de Lalaing's work could match photographs with finished pieces. And, unsurprisingly, I have no idea who the model was. But he's graceful and beautifully proportioned, and it's easy to see why he would be a favorite of the artist.

But to me the real "art" here, the real artist, is time and decay. Along with the original careless printing, the spots and smudges, the rough and skewed edges, are all the random and exquisite changes that time has wrought on the fragile paper. The subtle and shifting variations of color and tone, shadow and light. And then the images that have faded to almost nothing, the vivid figure, the flesh and blood man gone to ghost. But isn't it somehow become more, now, become the beauty of ruin, of time and impermanence. 

Gently polished ladies - six portraits by Jacques de Lalaing

Countess Louise de Baillet, 1902.

Better remembered as a sculptor - if, frankly, remembered at all - the Belgian Lalaing also produced calm, coolly elegant, and very smoothly finished portraits; of the examples I've been able to find, the vast majority are of aristocratic - or at least very genteel - ladies. Most if not all of those featured here appear to have been done in pastel.

Mrs. William Barrett Ridgely, née Kate Deering, 1896.

Mlle. Hélène de Burlet, 1894. (The young lady later became a nun and endured imprisonment during both world wars.)

"Lady Saphire", circa 1910s.

Countess Maximilien de Lalaing, née Julia Vibart, mother of the artist, 1896.

Countess Charles de Lalaing, née Baroness Christine du Tour van Bellinchave, sister-in-law of the artist, 1906.

Riding the false horse - preparatory photographs by Jacques de Lalaing

The model is posed in front of a large oil painting, Les luteurs, a preparatory sketch for the La Lutte équestre sculptural group. (See below.)

Here, the model is also posed in front of a large painting, apparently on the same subject, though it looks slightly different.

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Jacques de Lalaing (4 November 1858, London – 10 October 1917, Brussels), Anglo-Belgian painter and sculptor, specializing in animals. Born the son of a Belgian diplomat and an English aristocrat, he was raised in England until 1875, when he moved to Brussels. He trained as an artist under Jean-François Portaels and Louis Gallait at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, showing first as a painter. But he began to sculpt in 1884. As a painter he continued to work in a realistic, naturalistic style, as a portrait painter and producing historical scenes. As a sculptor he produced allegorical bronzes and memorial art. In 1896 he became a member of the Académie Royale where he'd studied, and from 1904 through 1913 he served as its director. He died in the midst of World War I a month before his fifty-ninth birthday.

The artist.

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Perhaps his best known work, La Lutte équestre or Le combat des cavaliers (1899-1908), at the entrance to the Bois de la Cambre, Brussels.

Two vintage photographs.

Three contemporary images.

Les lutteurs, a large scale preparatory oil sketch for the sculpture, 1884.