Visitor's guide
In 2021, the Musée L received a gift of 158 etchings by the Antwerp painter Walter Vaes, from Jean-Marie Gillis, Emeritus Professor at the Université catholique de Louvain. The exhibition presents part of this donation, together with works loaned by galleries and private collectors. The show explores the parallel strands of print-making and painting in Vaes’s career, and highlights the element of fantasy in his work – an aspect he reserved for his etchings.
Walter Vaes is little-known today but enjoyed considerable acclaim in his lifetime. He was born in Borgerhout, near Antwerp, to a family of leading local figures, intellectuals and artists, before spending some of his childhood in Liverpool, England. On his return, he attended the Antwerp studio of his uncle Piet Verhaert, an artist who specialised in genre painting and etchings. Here, Vaes learned both techniques before being admitted to the Higher Institute of Fine Art in Antwerp at the age of 14, under Albrecht De Vriendt (1843-1900), a noted painter and director of the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Antwerp. Vaes quickly earned the highest honours for an academic painter of his day: the Prix de Rome in 1904 (at the age of 22), a post at the Higher Institute of Fine Art in Antwerp in 1924, and election to Belgium’s Flemish Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1938. His still-lifes and portraits are in the Flemish tradition, with a fresh, realist tendency that reflects the success and influence of Gustave Courbet’s painting Les Casseurs de pierres (‘The Stone Breakers’), when it was shown at the Brussels Salon in 1851. The Antwerp School’s Realist renaissance was spearheaded by Henri Leys (1815-1869), his pupil Henri De Braekeleer (1840-1888), and Piet Verhaert (1852-1908). The three masters were an important influence for Vaes.
Vaes very soon abandoned history painting and mythological scenes, to concentrate on smaller-scale portraits and still-lifes, beginning in 1905. His still-lifes of animal subjects – a single skate-fish, a crab lying on its back, a fish-head on a plate, a chicken carcass, etc. – fall clearly within Courbet’s repertory of ‘visible and tangible things’, but also show a taste for the monstrous and grotesque that finds free expression in his etchings, and only there. Vaes’s etchings are populated with disturbing insects, monsters and hybrid creatures (a shellfish-man) – a phantasmagorical bestiary clearly inspired by Bosch and Breughel – especially during the First World War when these ‘diabolical’ figures served to caricature the German and Austrian troops attacking the city of Antwerp. This fantastical tendency had emerged before the war, however, as seen in the small print displayed here, made in 1905 and entitled the Supplice de Philippe II / Marteling van Filips II (‘Torture of Felipe II’). The title refers to Charles De Coster’s novel La Légende et les Aventures héroïques, joyeuses et glorieuses d’Ulenspiegel et de Lamme Goedzak au pays de Flandre et ailleurs (‘The Legend and Heroic, Joyous, Glorious Adventures of Thyl Ulenspiegel and Lamme Goedzak in Flanders and Elsewhere’, 1867). The hero, Thyl Ulenspiegel, is a character from German and Flemish folklore. De Coster’s book inspired a wealth of engravings in Belgium in the early 20th century (published by Albert Delstanche, Frans Masereel, Henri Van Straten and others). In Vaes’s small etching, we see Felipe II of Spain tortured by imaginary creatures.
Vaes began print-making around 1900, and abandoned the medium in the 1930s. He produced some 350 etchings, most of which he printed himself. Like many artists, he made etchings as a private pastime, and sold them only to his immediate circle. In addition to the ‘devilries’, we find numerous picturesque scenes: a blacksmith at work in his forge, views of Antwerp, churches, and a great many landscapes. Vaes abandoned landscape painting around 1907, but embraced the genre in his etchings, where he often recorded scenes from his travels: Italy, visited in 1905, the southern Mediterranean shortly after (Beirut, Damascus, Cairo etc.), the coastline of Flanders (Koksijde, Furnes, Nieuwpoort), and Holland (Veere) where Vaes sought refuge from 1914 to 1918.
Etching as a technique consists in drawing directly onto a metal plate covered in acid-resistant varnish, using a pointed needle. When the plate is immersed in acid, only the lines uncovered by the needle are ‘bitten’. The prints that result have a spontaneity close to drawing; etching allows the artist to quickly sketch a motif in the open air. Vaes’s landscapes are influenced by the picturesque realism of etchings by Henri Leys, Henri De Braekeleer and Piet Verhaert. His use of print-making for fantastical and satirical subjects is typical of a 19th-century tradition, but stems more directly from James Ensor (1860-1949), whose work he often studied. Vaes borrows some of Ensor’s motifs (skaters, Antwerp cathedral, scenes and landscapes around Nieuwpoort), and aspects of his technique, including a cursive, highly economical style and short, quick, densely hatched marks as in Cathédrale de Tours (‘Tours Cathedral’). Like Ensor, his etchings alternate between vedute and visions. In Vaes’s skyscapes, his wandering drypoint and imagination conjure cloudforms and monstrous creatures alike. The clouds in Bourrasque dans les dunes / Vlaag in de duinen (‘Wind Gusting in the Dunes’), shown here, prefigure the creatures that appear in his later prints. Vaes often drew directly onto the plate, with no preparatory studies, giving his stylus and his imagination free rein over the surface of the copper.
Bénédicte Duvernay
Note: The titles used for the etchings in this exhibition are taken from the list drawn up by the artist’s friend Louis Lebeer, art historian and curator of the print room at the Belgian Royal Library, for the sale of Vaes’s copper plates by the auction house Campo & Campo in 1976. The French and Dutch titles are not necessarily exact equivalents.