CHARLES HERMANS | ILS SONT PARTIS!

Charles Hermans’ early training was under the painter François-Joseph Navez (see lot 54) and later in his career he would become a teacher to artists such as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Hermans was celebrated for his vibrant, realist masterworks such as L’Aube (1875, Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Belgium) and Bal Masqué (1880, sold in these rooms on November 4, 2011, lot 27) as well as more intimate, emotive seaside compositions such as the present work, where fashionably dressed women look out to sea and toward departed loved ones, reminiscent of the work of his fellow Belgian artist Alfred Stevens.