Deeply impressed by the canvases Alexandre Calame (1810 –1864) had sent to Belgian Salons, François Roffiaen indeed won a place at Geneva in the autumn of 1846 and stayed for six months beside this master, before discovering the mountains himself.

That is how for more than fifty years his paintings came to be hanging on the picture rails of the three yearly Salons of Antwerp, Brussels and Gent and were included in very many exhibitions in the provinces (Bruges, Dendermonde, Kortrijk, Leuven, Liège, Mechelen, Mons, Namur, Spa, Ostend, Ypres) and abroad (Alger, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Bremen, Caracas, Dublin, Le Havre, London, Lyon, Melbourne, Munich, Nice, Paris, Reims, Rotterdam, The Hague).

M Roffiaen has ignored them, he has continued to accumulate landscapes of Belgium, Scotland, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, what do I know, combing them without rest, using the same formula, making do with the same sky, the same trees, the same rocks, unconcerned by the latitudes, according to the taste of a special public, who buy all of that and pay him handsomely.

"Although opposed to M. Roffiaen for his manner of painting, dry and thin, I am obliged to admire him for the prodigious ability and above all for the exquisite art with which he holds grandiose panoramas in the narrowest of frames, where he chisels the smallest bump with the scruples of a miniaturist.

Initiated in April 1854 into the most important lodge in the kingdom, The True Friends of the Union and of Progress Reunited, François Roffiaen pushed his masonic career up to the 33rd and last degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, his name appearing in the List of Great General Inspectors for the Supreme Council of Belgium, of which he was Grand Master of Ceremonies for twenty eight years.

His first marriage took place in Ixelles on 19 November 1847 to Éléonore Bodson from Dinant (1792–1854) and on 14 October 1858 in Louvain he later married Marie Anne Tilly, who bore him a son named Hector (1859–1895).

[1] To thank the city of his birth for the support they had given him, Roffiaen gave a Landscape with Hydraulic Mill (1844), a Waterfall of the Aar in the High Alps and a View from Grütli on Lake Geneva (1857) to the local museum.

In the first half of the twentieth century his name was no longer cited except by chance, his case dismissed in a few hasty phrases and often scathingly, preferring a livelier form of art, one that was more personal, more "sincere", more "credible", in a word, more "modern" than his, as if this was understood once and for all.

Since the years 1960–70, however, there has been a renewal of interest in the art of the "little masters" of the nineteenth century, to which there are more than one "folding away seat of some kind after the official armchair that many among them have occupied at the time of a triumphant academism and towards which certain people attempt to return, since the course of taste is in perpetual motion" (Gérald Schurr, 1979), and the work of Roffiaen is on the way to becoming rehabilitated.