Dominique Lang

Dominique Lang (1874–1919) is considered to be Luxembourg's most important Impressionist painter. He painted both portraits and landscapes although he was employed as a high-school teacher.

After completing his studies in 1901, he embarked on a Pre-Raphaelite phase when he painted the Baptism of Christ, a fresco in the church at Junglinster followed by paintings for the stations of the cross in the new church at Dudelange. Travelling on a State grant, he then spent four months studying art in Florence and Rome. Back in Dudelange, he faced not just financial problems but negative criticism of his paintings from the Cercle artistique de Luxembourg. He began to suffer from dreadful headaches, leading him into depression. His art was influenced by his reading Ruskin, Schopenhauer and Spengler, leading him into a Symbolist period where his work resembled that of the English Pre-Raphaelites who reacted against mechanisation by evoking the legends of the Middle Ages. His paintings "La jeune fille et la mort" and "La mort entrant dans la maison" are from this period. During this period, he left the family home and set up a studio in a poorer area of Dudelange.

After a few months in Paris (1905), Lang was admitted to the Munich Academy in March 1906 where he studied contemporary art and Impressionism (from 1907) which had a drastic effect on his painting style. When he returned to Dudelange, he opened a photographic studio which finally provided him with a reasonable income. In 1911, he married Anne-Marie Ney in 1911, who would appear in many of his paintings, and the same year he started to work as an art teacher. He first taught at the Lycée des Filles in Luxembourg City and then at the Ecole industrielle et commerciale in Esch-sur-Alzette. Unable to make a living from his paintings, for which he received little recognition during his lifetime, Lang had to remain a teacher for the rest of his working life.

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