Georges Croegaert

Georges Croegaert (7 October 1848 – 1923) was a Belgian academic painter who spent most of his career in Paris. He is known for his genre paintings of elegant society women and humorous depictions of cardinals executed in a highly realist style.

Georges Croegaert was born in Antwerp. He studied at the Antwerp Academy of Fine Arts. He moved to Paris in 1876 where he remained active as an artist for the rest of his life. He had a successful career as a portrait and genre painter. His paintings received critical acclaim and were sought after by English and American collectors. He exhibited regularly at the Paris Salon between 1882 and 1914 and in Vienna in 1888.

He died in Paris in 1923 after a long and successful career.

Croegaert painted initially highly detailed still lifes, bird and flower subjects and occasional outdoor genre scenes. He built a career with his salon portraits of glamorous young women dressed in sumptuous fabrics set in luxurious rooms. He also gained a reputation as the leading artist in the genre of ‘cardinal paintings’, humorous representations of cardinals engaged in various mundane activities in lavish surroundings. His works are very narrative and the objects in the background support the story of the painting. His paintings are characterized by a high degree of finish and a rich palette.

Most of Croegaert’s portraits of elegant young women are distinguished by their lavish detail. The influence of his relation, Jan Jacob Croegaert-Van Bree, is suspected in the elegance and realism of his style. When he arrived in Paris portrait paintings depicting the lifestyle of contemporary, fashionable city dwellers had become popular. The trend was started in Paris in the late 1850s by the Belgian painter Alfred Stevens and was then adopted by other Belgian painters working in Paris such as Charles Baugniet and Gustave Léonard de Jonghe and the Frenchman Auguste Toulmouche. By the late 1860s there was a ready market for genre scenes with bourgeois figures, usually young glamorous women, depicted in sumptuous surroundings. With the onset of the Belle Epoque in the 1870s, this type of paintings depicting fashionable women set in an interior became popular at the Paris Salon.

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