Fernand Toussaint

Belgian 1873-1956

Toussaint was born in Brussels in 1873 to a family of upper-middle class status. When his parents discovered his talent in drawing they helped him to develop it in full. He began studying art with Jean-François Portaels and at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts at the age of 15, then at the age of eighteen he left for Paris to continue his studies there under the well-known Belgian portraitist Alfred Stevens.

He specialised in painting portraits of women, still life’s and city-scapes, in the Impressionist, Art nouveau, and Post-Impressionist styles. His works include paintings, water-colours and posters.

Toussaint loved and was appreciated in Paris, but he was also attracted to London and to British painters such as George Romney, Thomas Lawrence, Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough in whose works he discovered the poetic and sentimental charm of the Englishwoman.
With his refined taste and sensitivities, Toussaint also excelled as a painter of flowers and had a particular predilection for roses, often in full bloom.

Despite his versatility, it was his studies of women that remained dearest to Toussaint’s heart throughout his life. Indeed, it was for the portrait of a woman, entitled Spring, that Toussaint was awarded the Paris Salon’s Gold Medal in 1929 and such was the painting’s success that the magazine L’Illustration did him the honour of printing the work as a colour off-print.

Toussaint died in 1956, in Ixelles (Brussels), Toussaint’s works, whether in oil or watercolours, attract us as much through the opulence of his palette as by the harmony of tones and his delicate touch, whether the subject is a portrait, a bouquet of flowers or, somewhat rarer, the still life’s!