Belgian painter Maurice Lucien Henri Joseph Marie Pirenne, the son of a textile producer, was born in the once-industrial town of Verviers. Self-taught and fiercely anti-academic, the artist was highly influenced by Vermeer and Chardin, who ‘sought only to make a perfect work’. He effusively rejected the virtuosity and highly evocative nature of Expressionism and once said, ‘Take your personality and lock it in a safe.’

While Pirenne honed his skills and technique in the bigger cities of Brussels, Ghent and even Paris, he always found solace in the familiar sights of Verviers and returned in 1900, never finding another reason to leave. He became curator of the Verviers municipal museum in 1910, a position that he kept for nearly four decades and which allowed him to help preserve the town’s local heritage while continuing to pursue his passion. 

At the beginning of his career, Pirenne painted large oil canvases of his hometown before moving on to smaller formats, mainly in pastel, of urban landscapes and, when his only son was born, scenes of intimate family life. For more than 25 years, Pirenne painted some 600 small, atmospherically luminous pastels that depicted life in Verviers. He also painted his garden and its flowers, then the surroundings of his house. Often, his works were ‘sober, simple, melancholic and poetic’. As he grew older, Pirenne turned to portraits of his living spaces, as seen in ‘Interieur’, which is owned by EKCART ASIA. 

Eventually, Pirenne concentrated on subjects in his home and studio, and created still lives of everyday objects, friends and family, and all that he can see from his window. From his balcony overlooking the city, he painted the sky that ‘one sees everywhere’.

Pirenne enjoyed a firm friendship with André Blavier, the librarian of the Verviers library and author of texts on René Magritte. Blavier would later on provide the text for books on Pirenne’s paintings, drawings and particular brand of Modernism, making the artist known to a wider audience. He also organised multiple exhibitions of Pirenne’s works and often quoted the latter’s self-summation: ‘I am neither of the avant-garde, nor of the rearguard. I am not of the herd.’

Though he became almost blind, Pirenne painted (sometimes with his finger) until the end of his life in 1968 at the age of 96. Blavier, along with artist and former student Louis Klinkenberg, acted as his executors.