Constantin Meunier

Constantin Meunier (; 12 April 1831 – 4 April 1905) was an influential Belgian painter and sculptor who is best known for his realist depictions of agricultural labourers, metalworkers, dockers, and coal miners, especially from the 1880s and 1890s.

Early life and education Constantin Meunier was born in the traditionally working-class area of Etterbeek on the outskirts of the city of Brussels. His family was poor and suffered from the economic hardship following the Belgian Revolution (1830) which took place the year before Meunier's birth. Meunier's father committed suicide when he was just four years old.

Meunier began studying sculpture at the age of 14 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels in September 1845. He studied under the sculptor Louis Jehotte (1804–84) from 1848. He also attended from 1852 the private studio of the sculptor Charles-Auguste Fraikin. While he encountered modest success as a sculptor, his encounter with Gustave Courbet's social realist painting The Stone Breakers in 1851 caused him to doubt the ability of sculpture to adequately represent the contemporary social and artistic issues that were of concern to him. He therefore gave up sculpture in favour of painting which he practiced almost exclusively for the next thirty years.

Meunier was a freemason and a member of the lodge Les Amis Philanthropes of the Grand Orient of Belgium in Brussels.

Meunier died in Ixelles on 4 April 1905.

Works

Museum collections In 1939, the Constantin Meunier Museum dedicated to his work was opened in the last house in which Meunier lived and worked, in Ixelles, Brussels. Today about 150 of his works are displayed there as one of the constituent museums of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. The Fin-de-Siècle Museum, also part of the same institution, holds a notable collection of Meunier's works. Other museums in Belgium with Meunier's works in their collections include the M - Museum Leuven , La Boverie (Liège), Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, and the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp.

Internationally, his work is also held by the Musée d'Orsay (France), Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Milan (Italy), the National Gallery of Art (United States), the National Gallery of Canada, the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Germany), and the Hungarian National Gallery amongst others.