Jan Stobbaerts - After the meal

Stobbaerts painted pictures of artisans, landscapes, animals and still lifes. He occasionally painted portraits and at the end of his career he created a few history and symbolistic paintings. His preferred subjects were low-life paintings of farm yards and barns. He was one of the first artists to start open-air painting in Belgium and he was one of the pioneers of Realism. The naturalistic realism of his composition Slaughtering caused a stir when it was displayed at the Antwerp salon of 1872. The painting shows a butcher cutting the throat of a cow in the front of the scene and the blood flowing out into a container. Stobbaerts demonstrated in this work his rejection of the idealistic subjects, which were common among the academic artists working in Belgium at the time, and that the depiction of a craft was a sufficient ground to select it as a subject for a painting. The Slaughtering was followed by many depictions of livestock farming including cattle and horses. While in his early works he painted scenes with pets in kitchen interiors in which the genre and anecdotal elements prevailed, from 1880 onwards stables and barns became a dominant theme in his work. The compositions in this period were painted with an almost photographic realism. His sober monochrome palette developed to a more balanced color scheme and he gave more attention to the effect of light. Around 1890, Stobbaerts' style underwent a considerable change likely under the influence of his discovery of Impressionism and his personal search for resolving the problem of light. Stobbaerts abandoned the detailed realism in favour of a very personal sfumato of light. His style became velvety, his brushwork looser and the paint more fluid. His paintings of the 1890s depicting scenes around the river Woluwe were made with an opaque, somewhat transparent paste. The artist concentrated on the effect of light and the forms, while they remained recognizable, became less clear as if seen through a soft-focus lens. The subject matter itself became less important. In his later works he abandoned his realistic themes and started to paint scenes inspired by Symbolism. An example is the Bath of roses, which shows a nymph-like woman who submerges in a bath of roses and remains unreal and impossible to grasp. Stobbaerts is the author of several etchings, which deal with a similar subject matter as his paintings.