Jan August Hendrik Leys

Henri Leys, Hendrik Leys or Jan August Hendrik, Baron Leys (18 February 1815 – 26 August 1869) was a Belgian painter and printmaker. He was a leading representative of the historical or Romantic school in Belgian art and became a pioneer of the Realist movement in Belgium. His history and genre paintings and portraits earned him a European-wide reputation and his style was influential on artists in and outside Belgium.

Life Henri Leys was born in Antwerp as the son of Hendrik-Jozef-Martinus Leys and Maria-Theresia Craen. His father ran a printing business specializing in religious images printed from old copper plates. The first etching by Henri Leys was a funeral image made for his father's shop in 1831. Henry Leys was not very interested in school but was very keen on drawing. His parents supported his proclivity and let him study under a furniture painter who lived next door.

Leys subsequently studied at the Antwerp Academy of Fine Arts: from 1829 to 1832 he studied from the Antique and from 1832 to 1833 he studied drawing from life. During this period he started to work in the studio of his brother-in-law, the genre painter Ferdinand de Braekeleer. One of Leys' teachers at the academy was Mattheus Ignatius van Bree (1773–1839), the director of the academy. According to a widely circulated story, during a lecture by van Bree on the draping of the gown and peplos of figures from antiquity Leys made a remark about van Bree's old-fashioned breeches. Van Bree did not appreciate the joke. But as the young hothead refused to apologize, the director expelled him from the academy. Leys never returned to the academy, not even as a teacher after he had achieved international success.

From the start of his career Leys painted history and genre subjects. His precocious talent was manifested at the Brussels Salon of 1836 where he exhibited his Massacre of the magistrates of Louvain for which he received high praise.

Leys married Adelaïde van Haren in 1841. The couple had two daughters and a son. The family Leys initially lived in the Hobokenstraat. In 1855 Leys had a more spacious house built in the street, which now bears his name, and was then called the Statiestraat. From 1857 to 1861 he worked on murals to decorate the dining room of his house. Leys won another gold medal in Paris in 1867. In 1862 Leys was created a baron by the Belgian King Leopold I.

At the request of the Belgian government, which supported the development of history painting in the country, the Antwerp city administration gave Leys in 1861 a commission to decorate the interior of the restored Antwerp Town Hall. He was asked to paint over a period of 10 years 10 monumental murals depicting key events in the city's history. Four of the murals along with 11 portraits of historical rulers of Belgium were completed between 1863 and 1869, the year in which Leys died.

Work Soldiers playing cardsHenry Leys initially worked in the Romantic style he had learned from Gustaf Wappers with whom he collaborated in the early phase of his career. He treated the typically Romantic subjects, ranging from heroic scenes of war and brigandage to scenes of daily life such as weddings and country festivals. Some of his works show the influence of Paul Delaroche, whom he had met in Paris in 1835.

Many of the paintings from this period depict specific historical subjects, while others were genre scenes or portraits. This development towards Realism made him one of the pioneers of this artistic movement in Belgium. In his scenes of 16th and 17th-century Antwerp, Leys sought to reflect the spirit and atmosphere of that time. His compositions of historical events and of everyday life were realistic and may have been inspired by contemporary French Realists Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet.

Leys' study of 16th-century Flemish and German painters also contributed to the development of a personal style, which mingled archaistic rigidity with realistic observation. Other artists such as Henri De Braekeleer and Jan Stobbaerts were able to transform Leys' teachings in a new and original language. Commander in the Order of Leopold, 1900