Biography from Odon Wagner Gallery & Odon Wagner Contemporary:
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Verboeckhoven began drawing and sculpting as a young child. In
1815, his family moved to Ghent, where he attended the Academy from
1816 to 1818 with support from the sculptor Albert Voituron (1787-1847)
and later by a Ghent patron, Ferdinand Van der Haegen. From 1818
Verboeckhoven was a pupil of Balthasar-Paul Ommeganck, whose classical
pastoral landscapes became a model for his own paintings, such as the Landscape with Cattle and A Cowherd by a Tree on display at the Rijkmuseum in Amsterdam and Halting Place.
In
1827, Verboeckhoven moved to Brussels with his family, and soon
thereafter was made a director of the Musee de Bruxelles. Thanks
to his initiative, the pictures in Antwerp Cathedral, including a
number of significant works by Peter Paul Rubens, were saved when the
town came under fire in 1832.
Verboeckhoven became a teacher at the Academie Royale in Brussels in
1845, and his pupils there included Louis-Pierre Verwee (1807-77), his
son, Alfred Jaques Verwee, and the brothers Charles Tschaggeny
(1815-94) and Edmond Tschaggeny (1813-73). Verboeckhoven frequently
painted the animals as part of landscapes by J. B. Klombeck,
Jean-Baptiste De Jonghe, Henri Van Assche, Barend Cornelis Koekkoek and
Louis-Pierre Verwee.
Eugene Verboeckhoven is deemed to be one of
the foremost animal painters of the nineteenth century. In
Verboeckhoven’s work animals often bear human characteristics and are
reminiscent of bourgeois portraits of the time. In his book on
Verboeckhoven, Berko writes “he could have been called the “Raphael of
sheep”, for his rams are so well drawn, arrogant and proud; his ewes
surrounded by graceful lambs, look gentle and complacent as ewes do,
and all his pastoral scenes are bathed in a warm, pleasing and golden
light. Eugene Verboeckhoven was a remarkable painter of horses,
goats and game; he also painted small figures on foot or on horseback,
playing scrupulous attention to detail; the gun, the powder flask, the
hunter’s gaiters, down to the picturesque hat, the threadbare overcoat,
the shepherd’s crook, and of course the last-born baby lamb under the
shepherd’s arm.”
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