Frans Vervloet

FRANS VERVLOET (Belgium, 1795 - Venice, 1872).
"St Mark's Square at Sunset, Venice", ca.1840.
Oil on hardboard.
Signed in the lower right corner.
Size: 32 x 46 cm; 44,5 x 57 cm (frame).
The iridescent lights of the sunset glimmer over San Marco square, giving an amber varnish to the architecture of the Ducal Palace and the imposing obelisks. Passers-by enjoy the coolness of the evening, with gallant groups and dock workers mingling at that magical hour. In this excellent painting, Frans Vervoloet has managed to combine the heritage of 18th-century Veduism with the contributions of the Posilippo group of landscape painters of which he was a member. In the style of Canaletto, he constructed a play of perspectives with particular emphasis on the panoramic, but he was not so much interested in the quasi cartographic detail of his predecessors as in working on lyrical values through a pictorialist lighting that flirts with Romanticism. The confluence of the pre-photographic precision of the Venetian Vedutists of the previous century with the Posilippo school's emphasis on conveying moods results in a highly evocative urban landscape.
Frans Vervloet was a Belgian painter and printmaker. In 1809 he began studying at the Akademie voor Schone Kunsten in Mechelen, where he was also taught by his brother J. J. Vervloet (1790-1869), a genre painter and portraitist. During this early period, he produced both genre works and copies of old masters (including Peter Paul Rubens), although he concentrated mainly on architectural painting, such as the "Installation of Archbishop François Antoine de Méan in Mechelen". Following the great success of this painting, from 1817 onwards he devoted himself to painting church interiors. In 1822 he was awarded a scholarship to study in Italy, where he became more interested in landscape painting and where he spent most of his career. After two years in Rome, Vervloet travelled to Naples in 1824. There he was greatly influenced by the group of painters of the Posillippo School, whose members, in their reaction against the more academic approach to landscape painting of the late 18th century, favoured a more spontaneous approach with an emphasis on plein-air painting. Vervloet settled permanently in Venice in 1854. His work is now in the Museo Correale di Sorrento (NA), Collezione privata, Venice, Museo nazionale di San Martino di Napoli, among other public collections.