(b Nivelles, 12 March 1866; d Brussels, 22 Feb 1921). Belgian painter and sculptor. From 1878 to 1884 he attended the academy in Nivelles; he then studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels until 1889. In May 1889 he submitted Job (Brussels, Mus. Ixelles), a strikingly Realist work, for the Prix de Rome. His profound disappointment at failing to win caused him to withdraw and seek consolation in dreams and the exaltation of an ideal beauty. In 1893 he set up his studio in Brussels and devoted himself to a gloomy and tormented art. He read philosophy and poetry, especially the work of Dante, and sought to become a literary painter. He allied himself with Jean Delville, who founded the Salons d’Art Idéaliste in 1896, and, with Delville’s followers Emile Fabry, Constant Montald and Emile Motte (1860–1931), Levêque practised a style of painting inspired by the theories of Joséphin Péladan and Idealist art. However, he did not exhibit with the followers of these tendencies due to an ideological quarrel with Delville in 1896. For health reasons he settled in Nice from 1895 to 1898. The sunnier climate of the south of France encouraged him to abandon his former pessimistic outlook, together with Idealist art, and he underwent a personal artistic rebirth. He also became a writer and polemicist, attacking what he had previously venerated.