Firmin BAES (Saint-Josse-Ten-Noode, 1874 - Uccle, 1945)

Provenance:
• Belgium, private collection

Bibliography:
• Georgette Naegels-Delfosse, Firmin Baes, Brussels, Éditions d’Art Associés, 1987

"There is something firm and masculine in his art, yet at the same time enveloping. His use of colour combines both sobriety and brilliance. [...] He perceives and characterises with penetrating simplicity [...] Nothing here is meant to evoke romantic sentimentality."

The artistic training of young Firmin began under the guidance of his father, the painter and decorator Henri Baes, a professor at the Brussels Academy. He continued his apprenticeship under Léon Frédéric, a family friend, then at the École des Beaux-Arts, and finally at a private academy, La Patte de Dindon, located above an inn of the same name in Brussels’ Grand-Place.

At the age of 24, Baes joined the Cercle Pour l’Art, founded six years earlier by members of the L’Essor group. Thanks to this, he exhibited for the first time with the circle in 1900, and later at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, where his work Les Tireurs à l’Arc earned him unprecedented success. Having become a portrait specialist, his growing recognition allowed him to receive numerous commissions. His clientele included members of his family circle, the aristocracy, and the Belgian bourgeoisie, including the renowned Countess of Aerschot, who commissioned a portrait from him in 1915.

Praised for his gift as a colourist and his masterful draughtsmanship, most of his early works were executed in oil and charcoal. From 1910 onwards, he discovered the technique of pastel. Fascinated by this new, complex, and delicate medium, he devoted himself almost exclusively to it. He began by sketching the contours in charcoal, a technique he had mastered perfectly, before applying colour, layering shades from fiery orange to coal-grey, delicately blended with his fingertips.

A significant part of the artist’s oeuvre is dedicated to portraying another class of Belgian society: labourers engaged in their work, depicted in the simple beauty of their daily lives. These subjects included a lace maker, a knitter—sometimes asleep, sometimes at her craft (fig. 1)—a young woman at her toilette, or, as seen here, a young woman watching over a cradle. Although the identities of these women remain unknown, it is believed that they were individuals Baes encountered during his summer stays in the countryside, particularly in Faulx-les-Tombes, near Namur. There, he rented the Château de Ville before later purchasing land and building a villa named Le Chenois. It was likely in Faulx-les-Tombes that he enriched his repertoire with these new models, painted from life as cherished memories of his homeland and the rustic atmosphere in which he had grown up—depicted without embellishment.

The painter had a routine of dedicating his mornings to portraits and his afternoons to still lifes. Exceptionally, the scene presented here unfolds under electric light—new in the early 20th century—likely in the evening. Everything in this work evokes silence and tranquillity. Whether a nursemaid or a young mother, the female figure appears undisturbed by the artist’s presence. She seems to emerge straight from a Dutch Golden Age painting, her head wrapped in a scarf, dressed modestly, and gazing tenderly at the cradle, where a sleeping child can just be discerned. It is likely set in a home the artist visited regularly, as the interior appears in several other compositions, including Lace Maker at Her Work in an Interior (fig. 2).

Firmin Baes became renowned for the exquisite finesse of his pastels. A fragile and velvety medium, pastel required a unique technique, and the artist developed a special method of applying it to canvas, which he prepared using a secret process that he guarded until his death in 1945.

M.O.