Door (andere) kunstenaarsogen

Through (other) artists’ eyes. Henri Evenepoel in Paris between pompierism and modernity

In 1892 the aspiring Belgian painter Henri Evenepoel (1872-1899) moved from Brussels to Paris to finish his artistic training. In hundreds of lengthy letters to his family and friends, he described his impressions of the French capital and its inhabitants. The letters not only provide us with a vivid and amusing picture of fin-de-siècle Paris; they also show that Evenepoel saw and experienced the city through the eyes of modern Frech artists like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Jean-Louis Forain. Their work had drawn him to Paris in the first place, but it was, paradoxically, Evenepoel’s academic training that reinforced his habit of looking through the eyes of other painters and thus, eventually, shaped his artistic practice.