Jan Baptiste de Jonghe

[2] When in 1812 he won the prize for landscape painting at a competition organized by the drawing academy of Ghent, he started to fully concentrate on this subject matter.

[5]He participated in various other art competitions in Northern France and Belgium and was successful in Douai, Brussels and Bruges.

[5] In 1841 de Jonghe was appointed professor of landscape and animal painting at the Academy of Antwerp.

[5] De Jonghe also played an important role as a teacher at the Academy of Kortrijk, where he trained a new generation of painters between 1826 and 1841, including Jean Baptiste Daveloose and Louis-Pierre Verwee.

[1] Gustave Léonard de Jonghe, the son of the artist and his wife Maria Theresia Commeijne, received his first training from his father and became a society portrait and genre painter who worked in Paris for a fashionable clientele.

The sky takes up a prominent place in his compositions as was the case in the work of Jan van Goyen.

He had a preference for wooded landscapes and adopted the typical manner composition used by Jacob van Ruysdael with a path starting in the center of the first plane with some trees scattered on both sides.

The mood is expressed through the sky, which is either calm, cloudy or stormy and the trees, which are either dying or in full bloom.

There is also some body of water included either in the form of a pool, river or pond, at which wild or domesticated animals are drinking.

[3] In his Landscape in the environs of Tournai of 1836 (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium), the artist gave the horizon an important role as he opened up the space and the sky became the key element of the composition.