Jan August Hendrik Leys
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Jan August Hendrik, Baron Leys (18 February 1815 – 25 August 1869), also known as Henri Leys, was a Belgian painter and printmaker was born at Antwerp.
He studied under Wappers at the Antwerp Academy. In 1833 he painted Combat d'un grenadier et d'un cosaque, and in the following year Combat de Bourguignons et Flamands.
In 1835 he went to Paris where he was influenced by the Romantic movement. Examples of this period of his painting are Massacre des chevins de Louvain, Manage flamand, Le Roi des arbaltriers and other works.
Leys was an imitative painter in whose works may readily be detected the schools which he had been studying before he painted them. Thus after his visit to Holland in 1839 he reproduced many of the characteristics of the Dutch genre painters in such works as Franz Floris se rendant a une fête (1845) and Service divin en Hollande (1850). So too the methods of Quentin Matsys impressed themselves upon him after he had travelled in Germany in 1852.
In 1862 Leys was created a baron. At the time of his death, in Antwerp, he was engaged in decorating with fresco the large hall of the Antwerp Town Hall.
