Van Sassenbrouck Achille

Achille (Achiel) (also called: de Sasse) was a Belgian artist, born in Bruges in 1886 and died in Ghent in 1979. He was a painter and draftsman. He received his education at the Academy in Bruges and at the Higher Institute in Antwerp, under the guidance of Frans Courtens and Frans Van Leemputten. He spent the First World War on the Yzer front, where he was seriously injured in 1916 and admitted to a hospital in Calais. Only after a year and a half did he more or less recover. His many travels took him to the Netherlands, France, Great Britain, Germany, Austria and the United States. He painted landscapes, marines, still lifes, cityscapes, rural scenes with characters and portraits. He reduced his subjects to their essence and depicted them in powerful, sharp yet flexible lines. From the press: “Throughout his life he chose the theme of his oeuvre, preferably in rural life, with working-class types, fishermen, farmers. He also painted marines, still lifes, portraits and intimate genre scenes. His landscapes are usually quite schematized, constructed in a simplified sense and with a strong graphic slant, despite the sometimes bright colors' and 'The fishermen of the North Sea coast are friends to him. He camps them monumentally and definitively. The men with a dozen crafts, the guys from the Scheldt and Durme banks, where he anchored his Pieter Breugel near Driegoten, have no secrets from him. There they stand with tawny skin, faded, shabby clothes.” (1931) Work by Achille Van Sassenbrouck can be found in the museum in Bruges. He is listed in the Lexicon of West Flemish visual artists I, CRICK, BAS I and Two centuries of signatures of Belgian artists. (Piron)