Art in Belgium

Lambert Lombard and Léon Spilliaert

Two less well known but noteworthy masters of the visual arts from Belgium are remembered this year with exhibitions in their birthplaces. The Belgium Post honors both artists with two postage stamps in an impressive design by Ingrid Doenen.
Lambert Lombard, born in Liege in the sixteenth century, and Léon Spilliaert, born in Ostend in the nineteenth century, may not belong to the great canon of international art, but their work made a deep impression on contemporaries and later generations in Belgium and beyond.

Lambert Lombard

Painter, engraver, architect, archaeologist and author Lambert Lombard was a real renaissance artist. He had contacts with important humanists of his time and was himself a great erudite. Lambert Lombard introduced Liege to the Italian style under the influence of Antwerp masters and a stay in Rome (1537-38).
Lambert Lombard lived beyond sixty years of age and was the court artist of the Liege prince-bishops, yet very few of his works have been handed down to us. Those that have are typically drawings. They are found in galleries throughout the world. The postage stamps and sheet include some particularly elegant details from the few paintings that can be attributed to him and his atelier with certainty. These recently fully restored paintings come from museums in Liège and Stokrooie Church in Hasselt.

Léon Spilliaert

Few paintings of Léon Spilliaert remain either, but the reason for that is a little different. The artist preferred brittle materials and such techniques as watercolor, gouache, pastel and chalk. They went with his immaterial and spiritual way of working.
Spilliaert's art is difficult to pin down, shifting between the nineteenth- and twentieth-century symbolism and expressionism movements in European art in particular. Primary forms, sometimes balancing on the edge of abstract, create a strange atmosphere. The watercolors "Lady with the hat" (1907) and "Vertige" (1908) on the postage stamps and "Self-portrait in the mirror" (1907-1908) on the sheet, from the Spillaert collections of the museums of Brussels, Ostend and Antwerp, are lasting examples of this.
Belgium, 24 April 2006

More information

Stamps of Belgium
Postage Stamps 2006
Queen Astrid
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Korea