Constantin Meunier
"My life consisted of work and dreams"

onstantin Meunier was born on April 12th, 1831 at Etterbeek, a suburb of Brussels. His lot was fragile health and poverty. His father was a receiver of taxes in a small way. His receipts were stolen during the Belgian Revolution in 1830; fear lest his honesty be doubted turned him into a neurasthenic and he committed suicide.
At the age of two Constantin Meunier was an orphan, the last of a family of six children. He was of delicate constitution.
The portraits we have of him, especially those by his friend Isidore Verheyden, show an enormous head in a nimbus of beard and fair hair.

Here is his portrait by Verhaeren, in 1894 :

"Every evening until he was fifteen years old he wept. He was growing: his body was weakly, his head huge and forceful; he was the Jeremiah of the family. Meunier always remained the melancholy creature of his childhood day's. In his last portrait he still seems weakly; he has a strong head and eyes gentle but infinitely sad, and his art too is an art of suffering."

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.


He became a pupil of Navez, this master of portraiture, and made friends with Louis Dubois and Charles de Groux. This influence is visible in a hospital scene, one of the first pictures painted by Meunier, at any rate the first he exhibited (1857).

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.


In 1878 he goes to Seraing, visits the glass works of Val-Saint-Lambert and the Cockerill Works which Victor Hugo, fifty years before, had vividly envisaged, when traveling towards the Rhine. What a poignant experience for Meunier !

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.


Certainly Spain is far from leaving Meunier insensible. An extraordinary world reveals itself to him, in the street, at bull-fights, in the dancing-halls. He makes innumerable drawings and paints the very fine sketches for such pictures as The Good Friday Procession and The Fair Cigar-makers in the Brussels Museum. He returns to Brussels in April 1883. He resumes work by evoking the Black Country and its workers with ardour, with a kind of inspired passion.

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.




Back in Brussels for a few weeks, he has tools, a lamp, and some miner's working-clothes sent to him.
He soon return to the coal-fields, to Quaregnon, Flénu, Frameries and Wasmes. He walks for hours, sketch-book in hand, a pipe between his teeth, sometimes expressing his admiration in a naïve way, like a child, before a subject that has particularly touched him.
He returns to Brussels. But he is not "cured" of the coal-fields, his spiritual home.
In 1896 takes place the exhibition at Bing's, at the Gallery of Modern Art in Paris. This time comes triumph. Writers like Clémenceau, Mirbeau, Gustave Geffroy and Lucien Descaves express their enthusiasm.




n March 1887 a terrible catastrophe occurs at the La Boule coal-mine at Quaregnon. Meunier returns hot-haste from Brussels. In the mine-mortuary he sees an aged woman bending over her son's body. With a lump in his throat, he makes sketches. And this is the first idea for Fire-damp, in the Brussels Museum.


For Meunier has returned to sculpture.
The poem of the mine, conceived on the coal-fields, has grown, and has become the epic of labour, in which the men of ports, works, land and coal-mine will be glorified and turned into heroes.

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.

Other interessant links :	Arts on the Web
	Aesthetics On-Line

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