Dieudonné Jacobs

Dieudonné Jacobs (1887 - 1967) is an impressionist painter inhabitant of Li2ege which shared his life of artist between the Belgian Ardenne and the Riviera and more especially Spa and the Guard (Toulon).

Biography

Dieudonné Jacobs was born with Montegnée, in the industrial suburbs inhabitant of Li2ege, on June 10th 1887. Resulting from a modest family, it lived there a rather sad childhood in one of the innumerable working houses which all, similar and without heart were based in the greyness and the trouble. Strange destinies that those of the three wire Jacobs (Joseph, Dieudonné and Isidore) that nothing, first of all, predestined with arts and who however all three knew the fame, each one in a well defined discipline of the artistic universe. Dieudonné becomes painter, his older brother, actor and tragic actor and Isidore, puîné, follows a glorious musical career which, very early, leads it to become professor of violin to the academy of Toulon. Like the majority of the other impecunious teenagers, Dieudonné works like apprentice in a decorator. Its artistic provisions being as obvious as its will been obstinated to take a quite precise route, it is registered with the Royal Academy of the Art schools of Liege. Despizing paternal exhortations, it endeavors to follow, with an exemplary assiduity, the courses of Adrien De Witte, Auguste Donnay and Evariste Carpentier. Working of night or as of early dawn, and studying the day, it hardly remains to him of time for the leisures or the recreations of its age.

Incontestably gifted for painting and having tenacity to resell, its studies continue without clashes nor encumber. In 1908, it obtains a first purse. The amount is intended from there to make it possible to the stock-broker to travel in Belgium. This voyage is made profitable to learn and widen the horizons. It is the same of a following purse. This one enables him to remain with Paris. In the Parisian museums, he discovers Monet and the Impressionnisme.

Consequently, its future seems given. He sees himself well peacefully installed, some share in the east or the south of Liege, to continue there, in all quietude, a carefully traced career, similar to that of the large contemporaries Richard Heintz, Ludovic Jansen, Joseph Bonvoisin, Emmanuel Meuris, Albert Raty, Camille Barthélemy,… The fate, the war, the risks of the life decided some differently.

August 4th, 1914, the German troops invade Belgium. Patriot, decided to put his valiancy at the service of his country, Dieudonné Jacobs, enlisted with the 14th regiment of line, takes part in the defense of Liege. Wounded, it is made prisoner. Led backwards, he escapes. By the Dutch circuit, it gains the England, then the France and is found finally with the face in this tiny portion of Belgium, behind the Yser, back with the sea. A weakened constitution does not enable him to support very a long time the tests of moisture and water, in short the serious disadvantages of a war of position in a ground of sliced and muds. Exténué, bronchiteux, it is close to despair. Practically condemned by the doctors, it is reformed due to pulmonary Tuberculosis. Since then, the chances of the life do not cease following one another: having accepted the proposal of his younger brother, that which teaches the violin with the academy of Toulon, he arrives against any waiting to remake a health in the Var. Hardly restored, it recovers to paint. The landscapes are followed: of the department of Var coasts, ciels of Provence, trees in the gust of wind and especially the light of midday which makes speak its pallet.

It paints and is reminded; even there, in the VAr, it paints the fagnes, these landscapes of fog which it continues to carry in him. The chance makes him meet his wife, violently run up against against the corner of a street. Excuses in nuptials, a rather short amount of time metamorphose the painter, single person and taiseux, as attentive husband. With his wife, it shares a bohemian life. Lack of very safe of love, the couple shares. The absences are less and less well accepted. Some are necessary sometimes, to satisfy one or the other order, to go themselves from there to paint on the reason. Stock-broker of the foundation Darchis, Dieudonné Jacobs settles with Rome for four years, discovering and copying the large Masters: Caravage, Ribera, Tintoret. Already, it acquires a notoriety vaticane. It carries out portraits and other orders. The light of midday inspires it. It encourages it to paint pochades, then more important compositions. The fagnes of antan continue to obsess it, symbol of loneliness, the distress; and of sadness sometimes, when it is well only in the Eternal City. Chance always: two Brazilian amateurs discover in him the providential painter and buy his fabrics, almost in bulk, without disabling. Notable of the VAr having taken it in friendship, offers the lodging to him and a hangar as a workshop. Later, it enables him to acquire some corner, marvelously lost with the Guard, vast isolated village. In this time, the place was only parsimoniously inhabited. Already beyond the vineyards, the countryside offered the marvellous point of view, on the sea, the islands. The vegetable gasolines mixed in a wild vegetation made up of almond trees, pines, cypress, palm trees and mimosas. On the top of a timbered hill, with its hands, Dieudonné jacobs, builds its first residence, increasing it unceasingly, as its financial means allows him, adding a workshop to the room of stay, a balcony with terrace with the workshop, the second construction with the first, the whole, always, by taking care of the trees: cypresses, solemn guards at the entry of the field, palm trees whose trunks swell sap, mimosas which, when they are not in flowers, continue to intermingle the tonalities with green and yellow mouthfuls of sun. It is there that he lived, as husband, with his wife and her three daughters, always enriching a field expanding, as a painter, taking again the topics familiar, seen Provence, of Corsica, Venice discovered with rapture, and returning to the country spadois to paint its Fagnes there and for there ressourcer its nostalgia like its need for interior loneliness; as a man of good especially, always with the listening of the others, especially of those which, knowing misery, have shame to acknowledge their distress. It is there too that he knew the war, the occupation of the country, with dramatic consequences: driven out at his place, it undergoes the affront to see its house occupied by the invader, trembling for his residence sumptuously labyrinthian but more still for its paradise, this wood filled up of secular and irreplaceable trees. Then the unloading, the enemy rout, found peace came. Filled by the persistence of a deserved success, Dieudonné Jacobs receives friends, answers the orders. It resides sometimes at Spa sometimes with the Guard, with the liking of its mood. It paints: Fagne S recluses, peat bogs, Creek S with the sun, corners of Corsica; portraits also: a fisherman with Capri, a smoker of pipe, the paupers; or hieratic figures of some notable.

He knows glory. Montegnée celebrates it. The street where its native house is bears its name henceforth. The town of Spa where it remains with pleasure and where it hopes so many admirors continuous to accommodate it with heat and friendship. Considered museums, with Rome, Paris, Liege, Spa acquired some of its works. Comes time from old age, Parkinson's disease, an evil which prevents its hands, more and more trembling, to paint, to even hold of the brushes. The physical sufferings and morals overpower it. Until the day when death comes. Deceased at his place on January 22nd 1967, Dieudonné Jacobs knows the posthumous joy to be buried in its garden. Since 1971, fall it from its wife is next to it his, perpetuating their long union.

Criticisms

Painter of the fagne, Dieudonné Jacobs gives us a romantic interpretation of it: (...) gray, low and heavy ciels. Extended solitary and russet-red… it would be said that the life was arrètée, solidified on the high plateaus… vegetations malingres, genévriers rabougris, birches twisted by the winds, the rain or snow… But he interprets it with his heart and it is then it tragic humanity of this peat ground which he interprets with broad dry keys (...) Jacobs extremely well included/understood the ciels fagnards, always ready to melt out of water and this soft, underhand ground, full with obstacles. Joseph Schetter (s.d.)

Contemplate its évoquations of the Riviera, and this blue water, and this greenery which it so subtly included/understood. Traverse Italy using the splendid fabrics which it dedicated to Venice or the island of Capri. But seize especially these tons rough and gray of its landscapes of Ardenne, the impression of vastness of its fagnes, the eloquent sincerity of its preferred corners of Wallonia. Georges Dopagne (s.d.)

Jacobs likes Italy with the passion of its Latin heart (...) Its painting, with its broad invoice, is very whole a joy of colors. There is in such of its toumentées fabrics, a whole sympathy of tons, a whole power of figuration, all a fantastic expression of life? Its own technique is passion with sonority. The spatula operates without brushing nor to lick. It carries in oneself the violence of a weapon and it puts in greater value poetry naturlle and paramount of the artist. Guido Guided . 1930

If the man is to us sympathetic nerve, the artist is not it less. Of a readily rêveuse nature, enthusiast of ideal, he sought in his art a road of escape. Those which know that the life of the senisibles beings is " a sumptuous thing and triste" , these also know that art alone promises the miracle of a possible escape. In the South, (can one pronounce these two syllables without in being splashed with sun?) where it was fixed, the artist atrouvé environment particularly favorable to this promised escape. We know that painful circumstances are at the origin of this departure. We want to accept however some obscure push of the instinct which was to allow him, in contact with this ground fraternally accessible, to identify in it the true face of its desire and its dream. Jose Gers . 1930

That he murmurs, of a tone always right, the melancholic person autumnal good-bye with the gilded skins of the of the Ardennes forest; that he sings in the range of the white, of the pink and the green, the blooming of the almond tree of Provence; or although the nostalgic calls of Fagnes of its country, he answers by the canticle of the vibrations of Mediterranean nature, Jacobs can find in the most varied expression, the most favourable interpretation, the mode and manner most unexpected the renewal of oneself in the rarest unit of technique and invoice. Rene de Quiez . 1934

An artist, whose fabrics decorate the ogee mouldings of many museums of France, Italy and Belgium; but before a whole man, cordial, generous, who did not have for him, at the beginning, which its talent, its clear eyes and its immense heart; Dieudonné Jacobs was the painter of the deep horizons of Wallonia and of the landscapes of sun of the South, where it chose to rest for always under the hill of Holy-Drove with the Guard, near that which was the woman of its life. Josine Bastin . 1990

Pictorial works of mountain in Corsica or Savoy, of the fagnes of the Belgian Ardennes to the tragic sky, of the navy which calls with the escape, of the archeological sites of Italy, the setting suns and well of others, all is at his place poetry, size and control of beautiful, generosity of feelings and feelings in the drawing, the invoice and the colors. Colette Henrard-Séquaris . 1997

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