Basile de Loose Belgian, 1809-1885

Basile de Loose was born in Zele, Belgium. He was the son and pupil of the Belgian portraitist and painter of religious subjects, Jan Jozef de Loose. His half-brother Jan de Loose was also a talented religious painter. In 1825 the family moved from Zele to Sint – Niklaas, where Basile took a course at the Drawing Academy.

In 1829 he submitted a painting to the exhibition at the Sint-Niklaas Academy and at the Salon in Gent, where it was favourably received. Basile now decided to specialise in portraits and genre paintings, and moved to Antwerp to enrol at the most prestigious Academy at that time. Here he twice won a medal for being the most talented pupil in the years 1831/32. Two years later he made several trips to Paris, The Netherlands and Germany to study the masters of the 17th and 18th century. His paintings now become more balanced and refined, influenced by the French neoclassical style and the genre painting of the Dutch Golden Age. The narrative element started to play an important part in his paintings, which made him a popular painter and gained him several important commissions.

From 1837 onwards, Basile de Loose settled in Brussels. At the Paris Salon of 1841 he won the first prize and was honoured at the town hall of Sint-Niklaas. For the rest of his life, Basile stayed in the Belgian capital and became one of the most respected genre painters of his time.

The idyll of a happy family, the Biedermeier attitude of enjoying the small pleasures of life, is never more explicit than in De Loose’s paintings.

In the present lot we see a family admiring a portrait on the easel, while the model, dressed as a 17th century milk-maid, is posing to the right. The figures in this painting are models Basile de Loose frequently used. They are probably his family members, and in the course of years, we see them aging in his paintings. The pater familias in the present lot for instance is also a model in ‘ The hatter’ (see illustration), but with a much younger face.    

The warmth of the family atmosphere and the intimacy of the Biedermeier room, makes the present lot a valuable record of a long-lost age.