Guillaume VOGELS (1836-1896)

GUILLAUME VOGELS

4. Barques à quai, c.1882 — Ensor and Toussaint

The friendship between Guillaume Vogels and the much younger James Ensor provides one of the most consequential links between successive generations of the Belgian avant-garde, and Barques à quaimakes immediately visible what Ensor could find compelling in the older painter's example. Great sails rise as slabs of coloured grey; hulls are assembled from broad horizontal strokes; masts and rigging cut through them as nervous lines, while boat, water and quay seem fashioned from the same painterly substance. Against this restricted harmony, the minute red-dotted figure acquires extraordinary intensity. Vogels and Ensor painted and travelled together, and the younger artist would push still further this freedom to allow colour and facture to compete with represented form. The painting later belonged to Frédéric “Fritz” Toussaint, himself trained as a Sunday painter by Louis Dubois and Théodore Baron but ultimately far more consequential as a wealthy patron and collector. In 1906 his collection transformed Brussels' public museums: twenty-five works from his collection were selected by the Royal Museums, while a substantially larger group passed to the Musée d'Ixelles, becoming one of the foundations of its exceptional holdings of late nineteenth-century Belgian art. The provenance is therefore particularly apt: a painting born from the friendships of the avant-garde subsequently entered the collection of one of the men who helped secure that generation's place in Belgium's museums.