Charles Verlat

Charles Michel Maria Verlat was born on November 13, 1824, in Antwerp. He trained at the Antwerp Royal Academy of Fine Arts and later in Paris under Thomas Couture. His early career included travel to the Middle East, Palestine, and Egypt in the 1850s, which supplied him with Oriental subjects. He taught at the Weimar School of Art from 1866 to 1876 and later became director of the Antwerp Academy from 1885 until his death.

Verlat painted religious subjects, animal paintings, portraits, and historical scenes. His large religious canvases — Mother of the Messiah and the Four Evangelists (1873), The Oppressed, the Inquisitors, the Idolaters (1877) — are among his most ambitious works. His later career as director of the Antwerp Academy is art-historically significant: Van Gogh studied briefly at the Academy in 1885–86 and had a famously difficult relationship with Verlat, who dismissed Van Gogh's work. Verlat died in Antwerp on October 23, 1890.

Verlat worked in the academic tradition with competence and ambition. His religious canvases are broadly painted with theatrical lighting effects; his portraits — of Théophile Smekens (1886), the sculptor Jacques De Braekeleer (1886), the painter Louis Derickx (1886) — demonstrate straightforward academic portraiture in the Belgian tradition.

Verlat is chiefly significant in art history for his directorship of the Antwerp Academy and his rejection of Van Gogh's applications for academic advancement — an irony that subsequent history has made famous. As a painter he was a competent representative of the Belgian academic tradition without reaching the first rank.