The Antique European Paintings I Brought Home from Belgium and France
I came home from three glorious and exhausting weeks in Belgium and France with a stack of small paintings, in my luggage, and a longer list of questions. The paintings I brought home are not signed by anyone you would know. None of them have catalogue raisonnés. None of them are halo pieces. What they have, instead, is the kind of detail that makes you stop and look twice.
This is what I love about sourcing antique European paintings at this scale. Pre-stretched canvas, ready-mixed paint in tubes invented in 1841, academy boards in every art-supply shop in Paris. There was a flood of trained academic painters meeting that demand. Most of the small unsigned cabinet pictures you see today come from that exact moment, and most of them carry small puzzles inside them that the original buyer would have read instantly and we no longer can.
So I bring them home, and I sit with them, and I try to figure out what they are saying. Sometimes I can. Sometimes I cannot. These are the eight pieces I keep returning to, and the questions I am still asking about each one.
Why did 19th century buyers want paintings of cows in their homes?
When you see cows grazing in a 19th century European landscape, you are looking at a coded image of prosperity. Cattle meant wealth, stable land ownership, and the slow rhythm of rural life that the urban middle class was beginning to romanticize as Europe industrialized. The cows are not just cows.
Is there any significance to a French Bulldog-type dog running alongside a pair of horses?
Because in 1889, the bouledogue français was the new “it” dog of Paris, right in the middle of the decade when the breed was being formalized. The first French bulldog club had been founded in 1880, the official standard wouldn’t come until 1898, and in between, sporting circles, theatrical types, and country gentlemen all kept these little brindle dogs as stable companions and ratters. This oil, signed J A Durbec and dated 1889, catches that exact moment in the breed’s history. The painter knew horses from inside the saddle and clearly knew the dogs that ran with them, too.
Was the way she's facing a choice, or just how she sat that day?
In traditional portraiture, the direction the sitter faces was meaningful. In couple portraits, husbands typically faced right and wives faced left so they could be hung together. A single portrait facing right was thought to suggest forward-looking ambition, while one facing left suggested introspection.
Is this a real building, or a building the painter invented?
That checkerboard masonry is not a real building, it is a costume. Late nineteenth century French historicist painters borrowed architectural details like patterned stonework, classical pillars, and ornamental gates to signal an idealized eighteenth century estate without committing to a specific place. The viewer was meant to read wealth, order, and lineage instantly, the way we read a film set today. Once you know to look for that visual vocabulary, you start spotting it across hundreds of paintings from this period.
Why does a French still life from the 1900s have a dragonfly on the wine glass?
The dragonfly on the wine glass in this little French still life is a direct quote from painters like Balthasar van der Ast and the Bosschaert family, who used insects as quiet vanitas symbols, reminders that beauty does not last. The artist who painted this one in late 19th or early 20th century France knew exactly what they were referencing. Eight by four inches in the sight, signed with indistinct initials lower right, oil on a thick hardwood panel. I brought it back from France last week.
A decorated boat, a crowd in formation, a banner being carried. What event is this actually?
This French School oil on panel, circa 1860, shows what reads as a public event, with figures organized in a procession line, a banner held aloft in the middle distance, and a decorated boat moored at the riverbank with figures around it. Could be a regatta. Could be a religious water procession. Could be a fête champêtre at a landscaped park. The painting will not commit to one reading and I am not going to invent one for it.
Why was 19th century Europe obsessed with painting castles by moonlight?
Think of it as the period's version of doom-scrolling old cathedrals on Pinterest. After Caspar David Friedrich set the template, every academy-trained painter across Germany, Belgium, and France was making moonlit ruins for middle-class drawing rooms, because people wanted to come home from the factory or the office and feel something quiet and a little melancholy on their wall. I bought this one in Paris last week, oil on solid oak panel, late 19th century, unsigned. Same instinct that has us lighting candles and putting on a record at the end of a long day, just painted onto a board in 1880.
Is this a painting of a tree, or a painting of a man under a tree?
19th century landscape painters used small figures like this constantly. The technical word is staffage, a figure placed in a landscape to give scale, to suggest mood, to offer the viewer somewhere to stand inside the scene. He is a measuring stick for the tree, to help give perspective.
Each of these pieces will be available during my live sale on Sunday, May 4th, on Instagram. A few are already in the shop, in the Fine Art collection, if you want to look now.
1 comment
Thank you my friend, for sharing you love of knowledge, as well as the antiques you curate. Your incredible style, taste and heart make us all better curators and shop owners.