After moving to Paris where he spent most of his active career, he became successful with his scenes of glamorous women in richly decorated interiors.

He continued his studies in Brussels at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts where leading Belgian painter François-Joseph Navez was one of his teachers.

This large canvas was presented at the Brussels Salon of 1854 and was at the time regarded as an important flag of revolt against the old classics, romantics and academics in Belgian art.

[1] Subsequently de Jonghe left the course of Realism and changed his subject matter to portraits and genre scenes and the occasional landscape.

[6] By the late 1860s there was a ready market for genre scenes with bourgeois figures, usually young glamorous women, in luxurious surroundings.

[7] With the onset of the Belle Epoque in the 1870s, this type of painting depicting fashionable women set in an interior became popular at the Paris Salon.

Through the choice of pose, clothing and setting de Jonghe characterized the type of person represented.