Omer Coppens

Omer Coppens (1864–1926) was a Belgian impressionist and orientalist painter, ceramic artist, and bookbinder.

Born in Dunkirk, Coppens studied art at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts at Ghent and worked in the south of France, Italy, and Morocco, painting genre scenes, seascapes, and landscapes. He taught Arthur Craco, who produced his first ceramics in the workshop of Coppens.

Seeking the true use of light, the realist brushstrokes of Coppens's early work developed into a more autochthonous Impressionism, under the influence of the work of his friend Théo van Rysselberghe, Coppens became the secretary of a group called Pour l'Art and was also a member of l'Essor and the Cercle artistique et littéraire de Bruxelles.

In 1898, The Magazine of Art noted that "Coppens loves and depicts moonlit scenes, where the whiteness of the houses is tempered with a greenish blue."

Influenced by Art Nouveau, Coppens is best known as a painter, engraver, and ceramic artist, but he also worked in pewter and was a bookbinder.

Coppens took part in the Brussels Universal Exhibition of 1910.

Coppens died in 1926 in Ixelles.

In 2001, the Rouge-Cloître Art Centre in Brussels mounted an exhibition entitled "Omer Coppens or the Dream of Art Nouveau", in collaboration with the Free University of Brussels, the Royal Museums of Art and History, the Horta Museum, and the International Centre for the Study of the 19th century.