Jean Vanden Eeckhoudt (Belgian, 1875 – 1946)

Profile of Zoum, the artist’s daughter circa 1918

Charcoal on paper

12.3/8 x 10.1/2 in. (31.5 x 26.7 cm.)

Signed with atelier stamp (on the reverse)

Provenance: from the studio of the artist

Jan Vanden Eeckhoudt (known to his friends as ‘Vanden’) was the grandson of the genre painter François Verheyden and nephew of the landscape and portrait painter Isidore Verheyden. It was in his uncle’s studio that, as a youth, he met such artists as Constantin Meunier, Georges Lemmen and Théo van Rysselberghe, who was to become a close friend. Vanden Eeckhoudt’s earliest known work, a still life of crysanthemums, was painted in 1889, when he was just fourteen years old. The following year, on the advice of Meunier, he entered the studio of the painter Ernest Blanc-Garin, where he befriended the young artist Henri Evenepoel. He exhibited his work for the first time in Ghent in 1892, aged seventeen, and the following year had his first solo exhibition at a gallery in Brussels. From 1895 onwards Vanden Eeckhoudt participated in the annual exhibitions of the avant-garde artistic society La Libre Esthétique in Brussels, and in later years also showed at the Salon de Bruxelles and Salon du Cercle Pour l’Art.