LOUIS

See also:

• LOUIS GALLAIT (1810-1887)

GALLAIT (1810-1887)  , Belgian painter, was born at Tournay, in Hainaut, Belgium, on the 9th of May 18ro . He first studied in his native town under Hennequin . In 1832 his first picture, " Tribute to Caesar," won a prize at the exhibition at Ghent . He then went to Antwerp to prosecute his studies under Mathieu Ignace Van Bree, and in the following year exhibited at the Brussels Salon " Christ Healing the Blind." This picture was purchased by subscription and placed in the cathedral at Tournay . Gallait next went to Paris, whence he sent to the Belgian Salons "Job on the Dunghill," "Montaigne Visiting Tasso in Prison"; and, in 1841, " The Abdication of Charles V.," in the Brussels Gallery . This was hailed as a triumph, and gained for the painter a European reputation . Official invitations then caused him to settle at Brussels, where he died on the loth of November 1887 . Among his greater works may be named: " The Last Honours paid to Counts Egmont and Horn by the Corporations of the Town of Brussels," now at Tournay; " The Death of Egmont," in the Berlin gallery; the " Coronation of Baudouin, Emperor of Constantinople," painted for Versailles; " The Temptation of St Anthony," in the palace at Brussels; " The Siege of Antioch," " Art and Liberty," a " Portrait of M . B . Dumortier " and " The Plague at Tournay," all in the Brussels gallery . " A Gipsy Woman and her Children " was painted in 1852 . " M .

Gallait has all the gifts that may be acquired by

work, taste, judgment and determination," wrote Theophile Gautier; his art is that of a man of tact, a skilled painter, happy in his dramatic treatment but superficial . No doubt, this Walloon artist, following the example of the Flemings of the Renaissance and the treatment of Belgian classical painters and the French Romantic school, sincerely aimed at truth; unfortunately, misled by contemporary taste, he could not conceive of it excepting as dressed in sentimentality . As an artist employed by the State he exercised considerable influence, and for a long period he was the leader of public taste in Brussels . See Teichlin, Louis Gallait and die Malerei in Deutschland (1853) J . Dujardin, L'Art flamand (1899); C . Lemonnier, Histoire des beaux-arts en Belgique (1881) .