Willem Jacob Herreyns

Subsequently, he studied at the Academy of Antwerp where the prominent history and portrait painter Balthasar Beschey was one of his teachers.

This school was renamed 'Academie van beeldende kunsten' (Academy of Visual Arts) in 1772 and was placed under the protection of Prince Charles Alexander of Lorraine, the then governor and de facto sovereign of the Austrian Netherlands.

[3] After invading the Austrian Netherlands in 1792, the French abolished the existing school system and as a result, Herreyns lost his academic position.

In 1800 he was invited to become together with Balthasar Paul Ommeganck a teacher of the members of the newly established Genootschap der Kunsten ("'Society for the arts').

The members undertook to meet monthly to show and discuss their works and enjoy the tuition of the older generation of painters such as Herreyns.

During a visit to Antwerp in 1780, the Swedish king Gustav III admired one of Herreyn's works called The Purification of the Virgin, then in the Saint-Michael's Abbey.

[3] His religious compositions stand in the Rubens tradition, which he had studied initially under his master Balthasar Beschey, who painted in the 17th century Flemish Baroque style.

He was a good colorist (tending towards the dark and red) and a draughtsman with a precise line, but his work shows a certain coldness and lacks originality.

[4] Herreyns' notable works include a Portrait of the painter Andries Cornelis Lens (after 1770), Godfrey, abbot of Tongerlo (1793) and John the Baptist in the Desert (1813).

His work can be found in the Sint-Jan Baptist en Evangelist in Mechelen and the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp.