Gustave Léonard de Jonghe, Gustave Léonard De Jonghe or Gustave de Jonghe was a Belgian painter known for his glamorous society portraits and genre scenes.
Background
Gustave Léonard de Jonghe was born in Kortrijk as the son of the prominent landscape painter January Baptiste de Jonghe. He received his first art lessons from his father. When de Jonghe’s father died when he was only 15 years old, his native city granted him a scholarship.
Career
From 1848 onwards de Jonghe participated in the exhibitions of the Brussels Salon. De Jonghe emigrated to Paris and began to exhibit at the Parisian Salons in the 1850s. He became a popular painter of elegant woman and group portraits of the bourgeoisie.
He usually preferred interior settings, in which he represented several fashionable details of the period.
In the 1870s, the artist repeatedly shuttled between Paris and Brussels. The onset of blindness in 1882 following a cerebral haemorrhage ended his artistic career and he returned to Brussels.
Leading Belgian and French artists in Paris organized a charity art sale to support the ailing artist and his family. De Jonghe died in 1893 in Antwerp where he had resided since 1884.
His work reflects contemporary tastes in art such as the Japonism craze of the latter half of the 19th century with its interest in Japanese art and artifacts.
His composition The Japanese Fan (original title: L’admiratrice du Japon) depicts a young woman walking in front of a Japanese screen, surrounded by other Japanese objects and catalogues of Japanese pictures. Gustave de Jonghe also painted some Orientalist compositions such as the Afternoon siesta (also called A reclining odalisque), which reflected the contemporary interest in the theme of the harem and the odalisque in Orientalism. Although his work may now seem sentimental and too adapted to then prevailing tastes in the market, its lasting appeal was already recognized in his time as being the result of the sincerity and perfect taste of its execution.