Louis Dubois

Who was Louis Dubois?

Louis Dubois, a Belgian painter, was born in 1830 in Brussels. He painted both landscapes and portraits, and occasionally genre and still-life subjects. In his style he was naturalistic in the extreme, his portraits having much of the vigorous life and colour of Frans Hals.

Louis Dubois belonged to a group of artists who, in the style of the second half the 19th Century, rebelled against the traditional painting of the past in favor of the style of this period. With the painters Theodore Baron, Louis Artan, Edmond Lambrichs, F. Foudin, on March 1, 1863, he became one of the founders of La Societe Libre des Beaux-Arts, the society was officially established in 1868 as "Comite de Salut Public revolutionnaire, pour la liberate de l"Art" according to Lucien Solvay. Rebels at the school of Courbet, they scorned the rules of the Academy and the aesthetics currently accepted; the artists of the "Free Society for the Fine Arts" freely and uniquely interpreted nature and reality, without following a common discipline, and stated their motto: "Liberte et Sincerite" and thus started a vehement controversy.

To make known and spread their realist philosophy, in 1871 they created "L'Art Libre" an art and literary journal under Leon Dommartin's direction; it was published on the 1st and 15th of each month.