Portrait of a Man - Edmond Theodor Van Hove (1853 - 1913)

Oil on canvas, signed and dated “Roubaix, 1906.” In this portrait, all attention is focused on the face, which looks intrusively and self-consciously ahead. Apart from the white collar and pocket handkerchief, everything—the clothing and the background—is black. Van Hove's pronounced realism in detail is reminiscent of the Flemish Primitives. He has therefore been called “the modern Memling.” In terms of artistic approach, this portrait is very similar to Edmond Van Hove's self-portrait (1879), which he painted when he was just 28 years old and which is now in the Groeninge Museum in Bruges.

Edmond Van Hove was the eighth child of Jan Van Hove and Isabella Hooghuys. In 1871, he went to Paris, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts. He returned to Bruges in 1875, where he was appointed to the Academy in 1890. In 1898, he painted his most famous work, The Three Sister Cities (referring to the cities of Ghent, Bruges, and Antwerp), a work composed of three panels measuring 70 by 53 cm. Each city is symbolically represented by a female figure. Van Hove moved to Antwerp in 1899 and then to Ghent in 1902, finally returning to Bruges in 1910. He painted "religious scenes, mostly set in the Bruges of his time, historical scenes, beautiful portraits, and allegorical scenes.