Edmond de Maertelaere (1876 -1938) - Danseres

Edmond de Maertelaere (Ghent 1876 - Ghent 1938).

Mixed media, pastel on dark paper.
Left, signed below.
In a passe-partout, without a frame.



Edmond already at the age of 14 won a first prize in decorative drawing at the Industrial School. Later he enrolled in the Royal Academy of Drawing, Sculpture and Architecture of the City of Ghent, as it was then called the Academy of Fine Arts, and he left in 1898 as a laureate, receiving the gold medal and a prize of three thousand francs. With this money, at that time a small fortune, Edmond De Maertelaere went to Paris and pursued studies for two years at the Académie Julian, under the direction of Jean-Paul Laurens, where, incidentally, he had Paul Gauguin as a classmate. It also enabled him to travel to Florence, Rome, Vienna and Munich to study the work of the great masters. In the Breton town of Pont-Aven he found an ideal artistic climate.

After the Paris period, Edmond De Maertelaere settled in the St.-Elisabethbegijnhof in Ghent and remained there for his entire life in the spacious building number 7 (now no. 11) on Sophie Van Akenstraat. Constant Permeke, Frits Van Den Berghe, Domien Ingels, Albert Servaes, Gustave Dierkens and Henri Van Melle lived or worked together for a long period in his spacious building.