Henry De Groux

Henry de Groux (15 September 1866, Brussels – 12 January 1930, Marseilles) was a Belgian Symbolist painter, sculptor and lithographer. His 1889 painting Christ aux Outrages, widely described as his masterwork, depicted Jesus being attacked by a mob. Later in life, he produced many works depicting the horrors of the First World War.

De Groux was the son of the engraver Charles de Groux and, like his father, trained at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts. Henry was elected a member of les XX in 1886, but was expelled in 1890 when he refused to have his works displayed in the same gallery as Vincent van Gogh. He subsequently moved to Paris, where he befriended Émile Zola; during the social unrest resulting from the Dreyfus affair, de Groux acted as one of Zola's bodyguards.

As well, de Groux was a fervent diarist; beginning in 1892, he produced 18 volumes detailing the life of a European artist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 2002, his descendants donated these volumes to the Institut national d'histoire de l'art; selected excerpts were published in 2007. Henry de Groux 1866-1930 - journal - Henry De Groux, Rodolphe Rapetti, Pierre Wat - Editions Kimé at www.dessinoriginal.com. Apollinaire writes of De Groux's exhibition in Paris at the Salon d'Automne 1911, praising with "...gives one the impression of an immense labor and a sensibility of the highest order..."

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