Henry de Groux

HERNY DE GROUX ( Brussels, 1866 - Marseille,1930).
"Gypsy".
Oil on canvas.
It presents a loss in the pictorial layer.
It shows remains of label on the back.
Measurements: 200 x 130 cm; 218 x 149 cm (frame).
A background closed by a sumptuous curtain focuses the viewer's attention on the figure of a young woman dressed in a dress that is far from the usual flamenco attire. The woman stands in the center of the scene with a rose in her mouth. Her haughty and graceful gesture reflects an ideal of femme fatale. This type of work was very common, and appreciated, in Spanish art from the nineteenth century until well into the twentieth century. Where the creation of popular patterns portrayed through an idyllic vision where the author is influenced by an aesthetic and romantic heritage, developed during the second half of the nineteenth century.
Henry de Groux was a Belgian symbolist painter, sculptor and lithographer whose work was characterized by a deep emotional charge and a remarkable expressive originality. His painting Christ Attacked by a Mob, executed in 1889 when he was only 22 years old, brought him early recognition as an innovative creator within the Symbolist movement, opening the doors of progressive artistic circles in Brussels. Although born in that city and trained at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, like his father, the painter and engraver Charles de Groux, he developed most of his career in Paris.
In 1886 he was elected a member of the artistic group Les XX, from which he was subsequently expelled in 1890 for refusing to exhibit alongside works by Vincent van Gogh. For a time he shared a studio with the painter William Degouve de Nuncques. Once settled in Paris, he became friends with Émile Zola, whom he even physically protected during the Dreyfus riots. In this environment he met key figures of the art and culture of his time, such as Toulouse-Lautrec, Whistler, Gauguin, Ensor, Rodin and Debussy, as well as writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Guillaume Apollinaire, Oscar Wilde, Léon Bloy, with whom he maintained an intense friendship, Verlaine, Heredia, Gide, Milosz, Remy de Gourmont and Joris-Karl Huysmans.
His production was exhibited in salons in Paris, Brussels, Ostend, Spa, Amsterdam, London and Florence. During a stay in the latter city he was committed to a psychiatric hospital, from which he managed to escape to return on foot to Marseille. He also illustrated literary works and collaborated with lithographs in publications such as L'Estampe originale (1893) and L'Épreuve (1895).
De Groux cultivated the image of a bohemian artist, passionate and overflowing, whose life was marked by instability and creative intensity. This perception was reinforced by testimonies such as that of Léon Bloy, who described him as a figure deeply committed to human suffering. His eldest daughter, Élisabeth de Groux, was an engraver and was married to the writer Émile Baumann, who published in 1936 a biography entitled The Terrible Life of Henry de Groux, which offers an intimate and critical view of the artist.
In addition to his plastic work, de Groux was a prolific diarist: from 1892 he wrote 18 volumes that meticulously document his experience as a European artist between the 19th and 20th centuries.