Queen Mathilde made her first back-to-school visit to the Mudel, a museum located in Deinze. The Queen of the Belgians discovered the retrospective dedicated to the Flemish painter Emile Claus, considered one of the greatest Belgian expressionist artists, also described as the “prince of luminism”.
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Queen Mathilde visits the exhibition dedicated to Émile Claus at Mudel
Émile Claus was born in 1849 and died in 1924. The year 2024 therefore marked the 175th anniversary of his birth and the 100th anniversary of his death. Since September, the Museum of Deinze and the Pays de la Lys (Mudel), located in Deinze, near Ghent, has been honoring this great figure of Belgian expressionism. Queen Mathilde of Belgium went to Mudel on January 7, 2025, to visit this exhibition, a few days before its closing.
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Queen Mathilde was thus able to discover nearly 130 works by the artist, exceptionally brought together under one roof. During the visit, Queen Mathilde stopped in front of the painting entitled “Twee Gestrafte Vrienden” (“Two Friends Punished”). This painting is on loan from the Royal Collection for the exhibition.
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“Emile Claus enjoyed great fame in his time as a painter of light, and Claus knew how to put on canvas the specific atmosphere and life on and author of the Lys like no one else”explains the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent. Queen Mathilde posed in front of the canvas “ The beet harvest », which is a work that was shown at the Brussels Salon of 1890, and which then allowed him to become known abroad. The work traveled and he won several awards thanks to it.
Émile Claus is considered the “prince of luminism”. Luminism is a term that describes a relatively eclectic group of Belgian, Dutch, American and even Russian painters, who in each country have their own definition. Belgian luminism is characterized by the great attention paid to lighting effects. In the case of Émile Claus, the feeling of sunny colors is one of his characteristics.
Nicolas Fontaine
Editor-in-chief
Nicolas Fontaine has been a designer-editor and author for numerous Belgian and French brands and media. A specialist in royal family news, Nicolas founded the site Histoires royales of which he is the editor-in-chief. [email protected]
