| |
 |
|
|
De Keyser, Nicaise
(b Zandvliet, 26 Aug 1813; d Antwerp, 26 Aug 1887). Belgian painter. He trained at the Academie in Antwerp with Mathieu Ignace Van Brée and achieved his first success with altarpieces influenced by Rubens, which he exhibited at the Salons of 1834 and 1835. In 1836 he made a name for himself as one of the leading figures of historical Romanticism, a genre then flourishing in Antwerp, with the enormous Battle of the Gold Spurs (destr. World War II). Numerous commissions from royal courts and prominent families in Belgium and abroad followed. He travelled to England and Scotland (1835), Italy (1840), Germany (1865, 1868, 1869 and 1871) and Spain (1878, 1880). In 1848 he became a member of the Koninklijke Academie in Brussels and from 1855 to 1879 he was director of the Academie in Antwerp. Between 1862 and 1872 he painted a series of scenes for the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp illustrating the history and nature of the Antwerp School and the effect and influence it had abroad (Antwerp, Kon. Mus. S. Kst.). Both his large history paintings and the genre pieces that he produced alongside them are Romantic in subject-matter, inspiration and in the Baroque character of composition. They remain, however, academic in their cold execution with taut lines and sharply drawn details. De Keyser was also a painter of elegantly refined portraits. He enjoyed great fame during his lifetime but soon passed into oblivion after his death.
|
|
There are more than 45,000 articles in The Grove Dictionary of Art.
To access the rest of this article, including the bibliography, subscribe to
www.groveart.com.
To find out more about this subject, click on a related article below and
subscribe to www.groveart.com
|
|
|
|
