By Emily Burkhart
September 26, 2024
Anna Boch (1848-1936), En Juin (In June), 1894. Oil on canvas, dimensions unavailable. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Charleroi, Belgium. Image courtesy of Art Errors.
Considered a grand dame of the Belgian art scene, the Neo-Impressionist artist Anna Boch (1848-1936) was both a painter and accomplished musician as well as a passionate art collector with a shrewd knack for promoting talented and struggling artists, many of whom were personal friends. Her large collection of paintings included works by Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), Paul Signac (1863-1935), and James Ensor (1860-1949), among others. Notably, she purchased a painting by Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), La Vigne Rouge (The Red Vineyard at Montmajour, 1888), that was believed to be the only painting Van Gogh ever sold in his lifetime. It is estimated that Boch completed more than 900 of her own paintings over her career as well. She was a woman of rare independence for her time. She never married nor had children; instead, she devoted her life to art, music, and travel. She was the first and only female member of the Belgian artistic group Les XX (Les Vingt, The Twenty, 1883-1893) and became one of the few female artists to achieve acclaim as a Pointillist. Today, Anna Boch has the distinction of being the most important woman artist of her time in Belgium.
Vincent Everarts, Portrait photo of Anna Boch at easel, nd. Private collection, Binche, Belgium. Image courtesy of De Witte Raaf.
Background and Education
Anna-Rosalie Boch, known as Anna Boch, was born on February 10, 1848, in Saint-Vaast, Hainaut, Belgium, into a family devoted to music and the visual arts who had been in the ceramics business since 1748. Her father, Frédéric Victor Boch, was the co-founder of the faience porcelain (glazed earthenware) factory, Boch Fréres-Kéramis, in La Louvières, Belgium, while her uncle, Eugene von Boch, co-founded the Villeroy & Boch ceramics factory in Mettlach, Germany. Anna received musical and artistic training from a young age, twin passions she would pursue throughout her lifetime as she became an accomplished pianist, organist, and violinist as well as an artist and art collector. Her younger brother, Eugéne (1855-1941), who also became an established painter and art collector in his own right, befriended Van Gogh who would paint a striking portrait of him in 1888. In 1876, Anna met the well-known landscape, portrait, and still-life painter Isidore Verheyden (1846-1905), who would become her mentor and painting teacher for many years, until she dismissed him as being “too bourgeois and academic.”
Les XX (1883-1893) and La Libre Esthétique (1894-1914)
Anna and Eugéne’s cousin, Octave Maus (1856-1919), an art critic, writer, and lawyer active in the Belgian art scene, helped found and was elected secretary of Les XX (The Twenty) in 1884, a group of twenty Belgian painters, designers, and sculptors. Anna became its only female member in 1885. That same year, she exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, France. Les XX held annual art exhibitions inviting international Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist artists to participate including Camille Pisarro (1830-1903), Claude Monet (1840-1926), Georges Seurat (1859-1891), Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) and, posthumously, Van Gogh in 1890 and 1891. While in Les XX, Boch met the Neo-Impressionist Théophile “Théo” van Rysselberghe (1862-1926), who would become an artistic influence and paint a thoughtful portrait of her in the Pointillist style. After the dissolution of Les XX in 1893, Maus founded its successor, La Libre Esthétique (The Free Aesthetics) of which Boch was also a member. She regularly participated in its salon exhibitions from 1894 until its last in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I. She had also joined with the painter Emile Claus (1849-1924), a leader of the Belgian Impressionists, as one of the founding members of the artist group Vie et Lumiére (Life and Light) in 1904 until it, too, disbanded in 1914. By 1915, German troops occupied Belgium, including Brussels, its capital.
Théophile “Théo” van Rysselberghe (1862-1926), Anna Boch in her Studio, ca. 1889-1893. Oil on canvas, 37.4 x 25.5 in. Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, MA. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Artistic Style
Though Boch is perhaps best remembered for the luminous, Impressionist style of the genre scenes and landscapes she created for the majority of her career, she experimented with Pointillism in her earlier works especially during the 1890s. In 1887, Boch saw the Neo-Impressionist Georges Seurat’s Pointillist painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-1886), which had a transformative effect on her aesthetic. Her brushstrokes were composed of small dabs of color but were freer and more expressive, putting her in the vanguard of the new artists: “I am not lumped together with the old ones but put at the very forefront," she wrote to her brother Eugéne, “I am so happy.” As one critic remarked at the time, “Anna Boch has admirably deployed the tenets of Pointillism, taking its sparkling light and leaving the idiosyncrasies of the process behind.” Boch produced her first Pointillist painting in 1889.
Selected Works
Tijdens de Elevatie (During the Elevation), 1892-1893
Anna Boch (1848-1936), Tijdens de Elevatie (During the Elevation), 1892-1893. Oil on canvas, 29.3 x 44.4 in. Mu.Zee, Ostend, Belgium. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
One of Boch’s works in the Pointillist style called During the Elevation (1892-1893) depicts worshippers–men, women, a young girl–entering a country church for Sunday service. Heads bowed, they enter the church in procession, their shadows silhouetted in mauve on the stone walkway. The women wear white caps on their heads. An elderly, gray-haired man brings up the rear poignantly moving with one knee resting on a wooden chair. He is the heart of the composition. To the left is the church cemetery, its graves marked by crosses. Behind the church is a silo and the thatched buildings of the village. Boch’s painting consists of loose, layered spots of color in a much freer version of Pointillism than that employed by her male contemporaries.
Retour de la Messe par les Dunes (Return from Mass through the Dunes), 1893-1895
Anna Boch (1848-1936), Retour de la Messe par les Dunes (Return from Mass through the Dunes), 1893-1895. Oil on canvas, 19.6 x 26.3 in. Musée d'art de la Province de Hainaut, Charleroi, Belgium. Image courtesy of the Musée d'art de la Province de Hainaut.
Boch’s Return from Mass through the Dunes (1893-1895) likewise depicts a church procession. Here, instead of entering a church for service, the people are leaving. A group of sketchily painted, faceless figures including an elderly man and woman, and a mother and several children are seen departing from the church in the background. The church and the figures of the congregants are indistinct, suggested in the sandy, coastal landscape. All is portrayed in shades of sunshine, mauve, green, blue and brown. From 1890 onwards, Boch’s painting was characterized by a significant use of the color mauve, which she used in particular to mark the shadows of her characters. Indeed, mauve shadows dapple the sand and dunes here, as well as the church and the clouds in the sky giving the painting its dimensionality.
En Juin (In June), 1894
Anna Boch (1848-1936), En Juin (In June), 1894. Oil on canvas, dimensions unavailable. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Charleroi, Belgium. Image courtesy of Art Errors.
In June (1894) presents the profile of a dark-haired young woman in a lacy white dress with matching parasol. She is standing by the steps of La Closiére, the Boch family’s castle in Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue, a commune on the east coast of the Cotentin peninsula in northwestern France. Purple clematis cascades down the stone bannister, mixing with other flowers and the grass below and stopping on a massive pedestal column with an urn of yellow flowers on top. Clasping her parasol in one hand, the woman reaches to touch a purple blossom with the other. The way Boch captures the sunlight and shadow is reminiscent of During the Elevation. A year later, in February 1895, Boch exhibited In June at the Salon de La Libre Esthétique in Brussels, where it received rave reviews for the manner in which she evoked the heat of summer. A few weeks after the exhibition opening, the Belgian State purchased the painting and gave it to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Charleroi. It was the first time one of her paintings had sold. The Mu.ZEE art museum in Ostend, Belgium, included In June in its acclaimed 2023 exhibition, “Anna Boch, An Impressionist Journey” celebrating the 175th anniversary of her birth that later traveled to the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Pont-Aven in France.
The Shores of Brittany (Coast of Brittany), ca. 1901
Anna Boch (1848-1936), The Shores of Brittany (Coast of Brittany), ca. 1901. Oil on canvas, 42.5 x 57.6 in. Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
By 1900, Pointillism had gone out of fashion and Boch’s works became solidly Impressionistic for the remainder of her life. The Shores of Brittany (Coast of Brittany, ca. 1901) portrays the pink-tinged cliffs along the coast of Brittany, France, on the English Channel. Composed primarily of beiges and blues with mauve and green hues, Boch captures the effect of waves cresting on the rocks, some of which are half-submerged in the water, and the unique colors of the granite. Grasses cover the top of the cliffs. In the distance, the billowing white of sailboats can be seen. The entire painting shimmers in sunshine. The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium purchased The Shores of Brittany in 1902.
Portrait of Anna Boch in her home, Villa Anna, in Ixelles, surrounded by her art. Date and photographer unknown. Image courtesy of DASartes.
Art Collection
In 1889, Boch began buying avant-garde paintings, eventually building a collection that came to encompass over 400 Post-Impressionist paintings, a third of which were by women artists including Berthe Art (1857-1934), Euphrosine Beernaert (1831-1901), Jean Canneel (1889-1963), Lucie Cousturier (1876-1925), Anna De Weert (1867-1950) and Nina Alexandrowicz (1888-1945). Prominent works in the collection also included Paul Gauguin Conversation in the Meadows, Pont Aven (1888), Georges Seurat The Seine at La Grande Jatte (1888), and Paul Signac La Calanque (The Cove, 1906) in addition to works by Henry Moret (1856-1913), Émile Bernard (1868-1941), and Jan Toorop (1858-1928). In 1890, at the Les XX Art Expo in Brussels, Boch purchased Van Gogh’s 1888 painting, La Vigne Rouge (The Red Vineyard at Montmajour) for 400 francs ($1600 in today’s value) where it was exhibited publicly for the first time. Boch later sold the painting to a Paris art gallery in 1910 where it was bought by Ivan Morozov (1871-1921), a Russian businessman and art collector. It is now in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and considered one of the world’s most prestigious and valuable paintings.
Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), La Vigne Rouge (The Red Vineyard at Montmajour), 1888. Oil on canvas, 29.5 x 36.6 in. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russia. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Boch purchased Van Gogh’s 1889 Plaine de la Crau (Peach Trees in Blossom) at the Tanguy Gallery in Paris for 350 francs (about $1400 today) after Van Gogh’s death in 1891. Julien Tanguy (1825-1894), a French painter and owner of the combined gallery and art supply shop, was a close friend of Van Gogh’s, both displaying his work and painting three portraits of him. Plaine de la Crau was acquired by the British industrialist and art collector Samuel Courtauld (1876-1947) in 1927 for 9,000 pounds or only about $11,990 in today’s dollars. It now hangs in the collection of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.
Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), Plaine de la Crau (Peach Trees in Blossom), 1889. Oil on canvas, 25.5 x 31.8 in. The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, UK (Samuel Courtauld Trust). Image courtesy of The Courtauld Institute of Art.
Death and Honors
In 1903, Boch was named a Knight of the Order of Leopold in Belgium. In 1919, she was appointed Belgium’s Officer of the Order of the Crown and in 1928, Officer of the Order of Leopold. While Boch continued to paint and exhibit until the end of her life, she unfortunately went deaf and lost her ability to make music, which deeply affected her. She died at the age of 88 on February 25, 1936, in Ixelles, Belgium, where she is interred.
In her will, Boch arranged for the sale of much of her art collection and for the proceeds to pay for the retirement of needy artist friends. She also donated some of her own paintings and some from her collection to various museums including the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. She left a further 140 of her paintings to her godchild, Ida van Haelewijn, who was the daughter of her gardener, Antoine van Haelewijn, and the subject of many of them. In 1968, Boch’s great nephew, Luitwin von Boch, an entrepreneur and CEO of Villeroy & Boch Ceramics, acquired Ida’s entire collection, but let it remain with Ida until her death in 1992.
Exhibition History and Documentary
The first retrospective of Boch’s paintings took place in 1994 at the Pontoise museum in Pontoise, France. In 2000, the Belgian art historian Therése Thomas curated the retrospective “Anna Boch 1848-1936” at the Royal Museum of Mariemont at Morlanwelz and in 2005 she published a catalog raisonné of Boch. Another exhibition about Boch’s life and work was in 2010 at the Vincent van Gogh Huis Museum in Zundert, Netherlands. The permanent Anna and Eugéne Boch Exposition opened on March 30, 2011, at the Villeroy & Boch Ceramic Museum in Mettlach, Germany; while in 2015, the Belgian director and writer Françoise Levie completed a documentary about Boch and Van Gogh entitled Anna and Vincent. The film premiered at the Wellington Museum in Waterloo, south of Brussels, on January 19, 2016.
To learn more about Anna Boch, her art, and her art collection, visit the website Anna Boch.com, established in 2011 to preserve Boch’s legacy.
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