Léon Herbo (1850–1907) Large Portrait of a Young Woman, dated 1884

Léon Herbo (1850–1907), “Portrait of a Young Woman,” oil on canvas, signed and dated 1884 in the lower left corner. In its original gilded frame.

With extreme elegance and refinement, Léon Herbo portrays this young girl with black eyes: in a tight burgundy dress buttoned up to her throat, with her hair pulled back, she gazes at us with her vivid, luminous eyes, in stark contrast to Hérbo’s flamboyant, laughing women. Here, the painter employs psychological introspection to capture the young woman’s purity and modesty, as well as the curious sparkle in her eyes.
The portrait is magnificent and intense, illuminated by its splendid original frame.

Measure
Canvas cm 75 x 60
Frame cm 105 x 90

Léon Herbo (October 8, 1850, Templeuve – June 19, 1907, Ixelles) was a Belgian painter, best known for his portraits of women in casual poses and for his portraits of actors and actresses. He also painted genre scenes, many with Orientalist themes. His wife often served as his model. He studied at the Académie des beaux-arts de Tournai under Léonce Legendre, director of the Académie, and completed his studies at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels from 1869 to 1874. He placed first in the preparatory competition for the Prix de Rome. He traveled through Germany, Italy, and France before settling in Brussels. His first official exhibition took place in 1875 at the Salon van Brussel, and he would continue to hold exhibitions there until the end of the century. In 1876, Herbo, Julien Dillens, and Emile Namur founded L'Essor, the Belgian realist school. L'Essor sought to rebel against the bourgeois and conservative ideology of the Belgian academic establishment. The group’s motto was “Eigen Kunst, Eigen Leven” (“unique art, unique life”), and it combined art exhibitions with lectures and musical performances. The Brussels-based group organized annual exhibitions from 1876 to 1881, as well as subsequent exhibitions for its members in Ostend, Antwerp, and London.  In 1889, Herbo received an honorable mention at the World’s Fair in Paris and was named a Knight of the Order of Leopold. He continued to work in Brussels and began teaching at the Academy, which he would soon head. A highly regarded artist in late-19th-century Brussels, he loved to portray the female figure in a refined style, skilled at revealing the beauty of the women of his time and depicting them in their sensual and seductive nature. Some of his paintings can be admired at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, the Museum of Painting and Sculpture in Kortrijk, and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Tournai. On October 15, 2021, in New York, Christie’s auction house set one of the artist’s records with the “Portrait of an Art Connoisseur,” which sold for $137,500.