
Here is his portrait by Verhaeren, in 1894 :
is elder brother had teaching him successfully for some years to
draw in a conscientious, patient, conventional, meticulous style, the
style of a copper-plate engraver...
The youth was sent to the Brussels Academy where, at about sixteen,
he entered the sculpture class of honest Fraikin. Of the artist's
early works we know only a medallion dated 1853 showing the features
of one of his nieces.
It was in his year or at latest in 1854 that - although it was quite
a skilled trade - he abandoned sculpture in disgust, to turn to the
painting which he had already practiced in secret.
eunier used to meet Charles de Groux at the Saint-Luc studio, a
kind of Jullien Academy at Brussels. It was necessary to live !
Together with the engraver Auguste Danse the two fiends applied
themselves patiently to objects of industrial art. They designed
church windows or Capronnier, playing-cards for a firm at Turnhout,
cottons printed on copper cylinders engraved with the burin for the
Hemptinne works at Ghent. They were artists and artisans at the same
time. I like to think of them in this intimate union which Michelet
has immortalized in a page full of poetry.
Constantin Meunier even paints the Stations of the Cross for
commonplace and much too new churches in ill-favoured surroundings,
for example at Châtelineau in the Xhendelesse. It was necessary to
live !
Actually, the most interesting examples we possess of Constantin
Meunier's art between 1860 and 1871 are his sketches, his very
numerous sketches which are piously preserved in the studio which was
bought by the Belgian State as a national museum.
n the meantime, in 1862, Constantin had left his maternal home in
the Petit Sablon and an officer in the African army who had served
under Canrobert.
They had six children, two of whom died in infancy. Two others sons,
reached maturity, only to follow each other to the grave in 1894.
To Constantin Meunier, to whom, after great struggles, suffering and
privation, had at last come fame and a certain degree of comfort,
this was a terrible blow.
ired of religious painting, Meunier turned, in 1865, to
historical subjects which in Belgium had already found interpreters
in such painters as Wappers, Leys, Gallait and Hennebicq.
It is 1870 : Constantin Meunier is nearly fifty and, it must be
admitted, has got nowhere yet. Only now is his true self revealed to
him, only now does he apprehend his real talent and the true bent of
his genius, which is still latent.
This is the great turning-point in his life. He discovers the Black
Country.
he artist was overwhelmed, profoundly moved, when he saw the
beauty, both sinister and pathetic, of this industrial landscape, of
these "brutal sites" created by man who, in equality with the gods,
remodels the world "after a different will", compelling rebellious
Nature.
Suddenly he glimpsed a world of titans and damned, of puddlers,
miners with bent back, taut muscles, enormous joints. This is what
must be evoked on canvas pending the day when, mechanically, the
fingers of this almost sexagenarian artist will start kneading the
clay again...
Just as he has discovered the Black Country and his mind is haunted
by the dark or grandiose visions brought back from his round of the
industrial province of the Walloons, off he must go to Spain on a
mission for the Belgian government.
Constantin Meunier's journey to Spain occupied the time between
October 1882 and April 1883.
n 1885, Camille Lemonnier, who was writing
Belgium
for the Tour du Monde, (a periodical publication,
edited in Paris), took Meunier to the Belgian coal-fields. And now,
here is Meunier himself in the heart of the coal-fields at
Frameries, at Pâturages, at Wasmes where another great artist was
some six or seven years before him : this was Vincent Van Gogh, who
had come among these miners, members of Baptists, Darbysts (Plymouth
Brethren) and Godiberts, to preach Christianity to them with the
ardour and frenzy with which later he was to paint wild Provence.


e wanders about the country, he goes round
or scales the black or moss-covered dumps. He watches the miners
going down and coming up at the mouth of the pit.
He sees the men in grey "pit-rags", their faces blackened by
coal-dust, drinking gin in the inns with bluish walls. He fills books
with sketches.
eunier, whose careworn and mournful
appearance recalled the fatigues, struggles and privations of a hard
life, worked to his last breath. He died suddenly one April morning
in 1905, just as he was finishing the Fecundity group on Zola's
monument.
The Belgian government has been well-advised to decided to acquire
the house and studio in the Rue de l'Abbaye, where he died, with the
works which have been piously preserved there.
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Extract from "Constantin Meunier" by Louis Piérard. |
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