Louis DUBOIS (1830–1880)

LOUIS DUBOIS — Autumn, 1879

Louis Dubois occupied an exceptional position in the emergence of modern Belgian painting extending far beyond his own progressive painting. As artist, critic, polemicist and founding member of the Société Libre des Beaux-Arts, Dubois contributed substantially to the formulation of a Belgian Realist aesthetic and helped prepare the ground upon which subsequent generations of avant-garde painters would build. In a series of sharply argued and frequently satirical articles, published under the name Hout[Flemish for (Du)bois], he attacked the conventions of academic and Romantic painting and defended an art founded upon observation, pictorial truth and the material practice of painting. The continuing relevance of his ideas is tellingly demonstrated by the posthumous republication in L’Art Modernein 1884 of his 1872 polemic Les Biographes et les Biographies, bringing the voice of the old Realist into the immediate orbit of Les XX. Yet Dubois remained above all a painter’s painter, admired for qualities as a colourist and for his extraordinary painterly “know-how” already celebrated by Camille Lemonnier. This small panel of 1879, painted only a year before Dubois’ death, reveals why: an autumnal woodland dissolves into broad strokes of grey and black, ochre, rust and orange, punctuated by fragments of complementary blue and the brilliant red of a solitary figure. That this late freedom continued to matter is confirmed by the exhibition L’Évolution du Paysage, organised by La Libre Esthétique in 1910, which included two landscapes by Dubois from 1878. Thirty years after his death, the heirs to Les XXstill recognised in his late work something fundamental to their own history.