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Paul Jean Clays (Belgian, 1819-1900)
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Biography |
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1819 |
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Born Bruges, November 20 1819 |
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1900 |
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Died Schaerbeek, Brussels, February 9, 1900 |
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Belgian painter. He was attracted from earliest childhood by the sea, to which he devoted his entire life and art. In his youth he made sketching trips along the Belgian coast. He studied under Horace Vernet in Paris and received advice from the marine artist Théodore Gudin, after which he was engaged as an official naval artist. Clays was interested by every aspect of intellectual life; when his training was complete he joined the circle of the mathematician Adolphe Quételet, Director of the Brussels Observatory, which included many of the leading artists and scientists of the time. In 1852 he married Quételet’s daughter Marie-Isaure (d 1860). Like Louis-Charles Verboeckhoven, Clays worked in the tradition of 17th-century Dutch marine painting and was initially influenced by Romanticism. He gradually moved towards Realism and became one of the chief Belgian marine painters working in this style with such works as Becalmed on the Scheldt (1866), The Antwerp Road (1869; both Brussels, Mus. A. Mod.) and Calm before the Storm, near Dordrecht (1876; Antwerp, Kon. Mus. S. Kst.). Clays was a prolific artist, best known for his paintings of the Scheldt. His work is marked by a gift for keen observation, rich impasto and a palette composed of blue, ivory and red-brown. *Grove Dictionary of Art |
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