Henry Luyten

In 1884 Luyten became a member of the art circle Als ik kan ('As I can') and participated in a number of expositions.

His main friends in the art circle were Henri van de Velde, Jan-Willem Rosier and Leon Brunin.

In the period from 1886 to 1887 Luyten resided in the Borinage, a coalmining area in the south of Belgium where the working and living conditions of the miners were appalling.

In his house, an old farmhouse surrounded by a large garden, he opened a private school of painting around 1900, the Institut des Beaux Arts Henry Luyten.

His international students included Mara Corradini (Italy/Switzerland), Flora Zenker (Germany), Mary Poulle (USA), Pierre Blanc (Luxembourg), Maria Jansen (Netherlands), Mathilde Bernard (Belgium), Charles Myr Lesaar (Belgium), and Hedwich Behnisch (Breslau).

Her family owned large estates and castles in Silesia, but lost everything after World War II.

Embittered, he and his wife left Belgium for a number of years and the couple settled in northern Germany in Wieck am Darss on the Baltic Sea.

Greatly disappointed with the Belgian boycott, Hendrik Luyten offered to donate his work to his birth city Roermond in 1930.

During the post-war repression following the liberation of parts of Belgium he was lifted from his sickbed in January 1945 and again jailed for one night.

Catholic or liberal, activist or anti-German, alive or already deceased, he portrayed all against the backdrop of Rubens' Descent from the Cross.