Frans van Leemputten (1850–1914)
Impressions de l’Escaut (Impressions on the Scheldt), 1884

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Gift of Charles Hack and the Hearn Family Trust

Jeffery Howe
Professor Emeritus, Art History

Quinaux taught at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels from 1876 until his death in 1895. His specialty was landscape, and among his pupils were Hippolyte Boulenger and Isidore Verheyden. He had spent much of the 1840s in the forest of Fontainebleau where he came into contact with painters of the Barbizon School. Often considered to be a bridge between the Romantics and the later realists, Quinaux had remarkable technical skills. Here he balances a smooth, luminous background and shady trees in the middle ground with bold touches of green for the waterlilies in the foreground. While these green strokes indicate lily pads floating on the pond, at the same time they sit flat on the surface of the canvas, creating tension between the two-dimensional surface of the canvas and the illusion of depth.