The Expiry Stone By Jean François De Boever, Symbolist Painting.

The painter Jean François De Boever was born in Ghent in 1872. He attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in his hometown under Louis Tytgadt, whose niece he later married. Tytgadt introduced him to the upper middle class and nobility; he quickly became a respected portraitist and a fixture at the official salons of Ghent, Antwerp, Brussels, and Liège. Suddenly, in 1909, he completely changed his style. He began to paint lascivious women in a morbid setting. His paintings would be filled with skeletons and boundless eroticism. Nearly naked women were depicted as servants of the devil, slaves who would establish his kingdom on earth. In his eyes, man became a flaccid toy, forced to submit to his every whim. In 1914, at the request of his patron Speltinckx, he began illustrating the collection of poems "Les Fleurs du mal" by Charles Baudelaire. It was not until 1924 that the series of 157 gouaches was completed; these illustrations are sometimes considered De Boever's masterpiece. Once he had found his own style, that is, a particular kind of symbolism, he refused to change anything. Literature, music, and mythology would be the sources of his artistic inspiration. His art seemed destined for success until 1935, when the effects of the financial crisis finally affected his clientele. He drastically lowered the prices of his paintings, but to no avail. However, this did not prevent him from continuing to paint in his own way and in the same genre, until his death in 1949. The measurements with frame are 53cm by 33.5cm.