page_title: Charles Hermans
section_title: Work
hierarchical_section_title: Charles Hermans / Work
context_page_description: Charles Hermans was a Belgian painter of genre scenes, portraits, landscapes and some still lifes. Through a number of his monumental genre paintings he played an important role in the recognition of Realism in Belgian art.
context_section_description: Hermans was a prolific artist who practised many genres throughout his career: history painting, genre art, portraits and landscape painting.  He initially painted genre scenes of monks. He subsequently tried to elevate genre painting by treating biblical subjects as genre art. He painted a Job visited by his friends in which he depicted Job as an ordinary poor man in a Realist style.  He then turned to genre scenes such as the Honeymoon showing a fashionable young couple clearly in love.  He later turned to subjects with a social connotation such as the Sunday visit to the children's clinic at St. Peter's Hospital.  In this composition he addressed human tragedy and suffering humanity in a moving and honest manner. The sentimentality of the subject assured the success of this composition.
  The crowning achievement of his genre art was the work of 1875 At dawn.  It is a realistic and moralizing painting representing an encounter of an group of inebriated revellers leaving a restaurant with prostitutes on their arms in the early hours and a group of poor labourers on their way to work. The work was interpreted as a work of social criticism by contrasting the honest, simple workers with the depraved bourgeoisie.  Hermans himself denied that his intention was to engage in social criticism and argued that he chose the subject because of its artistic possibilities.  
  Hermans followed up this masterwork with other smaller genre pieces until he attempted another genre scene on a large scale, The masked ball.  This work depicts one of the all-night society masked balls of the late 19th century, which were also attended by young women of the demi-monde.  The composition shows a large room filled with groups of partygoers some of whom are in the shadows looking from a balcony in the background while others are active on the crowded dance floor in the front.  Elegantly dressed men are joined by many women on the dance floor some in close embrace or animated conversation. Many of the men depicted were prominent personalities of the time.  Hermans was able to convey with a remarkable skill the jostling and carnival madness of a night at the theater.
  Not achieving the expected success with this work, Hermans turned to smaller scale works often depicting charming women, which were based on the studies he had made for the Masked ball.  These works are in the same vein as the society portraits of Alfred Stevens.  He also painted at the sea from which he returned with fantasies of nude women bathing and Bacchantes.  A new high point of this period is the composition Circe as temptress, which shows a seductive woman in a modern interior with a man passed out at a table with an overturned wine glass.  This was a return to the veiled social criticism of his earlier work.  In his later years he painted large decorative works and landscapes with many figures.  During World War I he treated some wartime subjects such as The martyrs and the Execution of Edith Cavell by the Germans.
  Hermans' large-format Realist works were influential on the next generation of Belgian artists such as Eugène Laermans and Léon Frédéric.
caption: Bath in the garden
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