Charles van der Stappen

Educated at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (1859–1868), van der Stappen's contribution to the Brussels Salon was "The Faun's Toilet" of 1869, and thereafter he began to produce work of a high and novel order in every class of sculpture, and soon, along with Paul de Vigne, became recognized as the leader of the section of the new Belgian school of sculpture which infused models derived from Greek and Roman models and the art of the Italian Renaissance with naturalistic detail and fleeting action.

[1] His best-known funeral monuments are those to Alexandre Gendebien (1874) and Baron Coppens, at Sheel (1875).

His statues include William the Silent, set up at the Petit Sablon Square, and two in the Brussels Museum, The Man with the Sword, and "The Sphinx".

The result of the connection may be seen in the group The Builders of Cities which is strongly imbued with the feeling and types of Meunier's sympathetic figures of workers.

[2] Among his students were Ilse Twardowski-Conrat,[3] Helene Zelezny-Scholz, Rik Wouters, Paul Du Bois, João Turin, and Victor Rousseau, who would succeed him as director of the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts.