The Artist’s Son Pierre
  • Georges Lemmen
  • Brussels 1865 - 1916
  • The Artist’s Son Pierre, 1896
  • Black chalk, on paper,
  • dated by the artist lower middle: 17 juin 96.
    Monogram stamp GL below (not in Lugt)
  • 333 × 246 mm
Provenance:
Private collection Belgium

As the youngest child in the family of a prosperous engineer, Georges Lemmen first displayed his artistic talent and ambition at the age of ten, when he was permitted to exhibit an early painting at the Exposition des Beaux-Arts in the Belgian town of Termonde. In 1879, he began studying at the Académie des Beaux-Arts de Saint-Josse-ten-Noode in Brussels. Soon he joined the so-called Vingtistes, a group of Belgian artists whose most famous member was Ferdinand Khnopff (1858-1921). An 1887 exhibition of pointillist paintings by, among others, Georges Seurat (1859-1891) was a turning for Lemmen and made him one of the pioneers of Neo-Impressionism in Belgium.

His subject matter occupied a spectrum of interior scenes and images of figures, with everyday life in his large family always taking up a large place in the artist’s work (Fig. 1).