Eugène Siberdt

Siberdt regarded this as defiance against his artistic guidance and made corrections to van Gogh’s drawing with his crayon so vigorously that he tore the paper.

[3] On 31 March 1886, which was about a month after the confrontation with Siberdt, the teachers of the Academy decided that 17 students, including van Gogh, had to repeat a year.

[6] Eugène Siberdt was a typical representative of the late-Romantic style as developed in Belgium by pupils and teachers of the Antwerp Academy.

[7] The teachers at the Academy encouraged their students to study the antique, draw precisely and stick to the sober and somber palette typical of 19th century academic painting.

[5] As a typical representative of the academic tradition of the Antwerp academy, Siberdt painted subjects such as genre scenes often of a sentimental nature such as The sad omen, stories from the glorious national artistic history such as The meeting between Erasmus and Quentin Matsys or international historic events such as Martin Luther translating the bible.

The historic scenes were typically set in the 16th and 17th century, de period during which Antwerp enjoyed its cultural and commercial heyday.