Louise Héger, the daughter of Charlotte Brontë’s influential teacher when she was in Brussels, was the subject of an interesting talk by Belgian art historian Eline Sciot in Tervuren on May 20.
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Louise, who Charlotte knew as a toddler when she was in Belgium in 1842-43, went on to become an artist specializing in landscape painting and drawing.
Sciot, who is working at present on a project at the Africa Museum in Tervuren, based her research into Louise Héger’s work on some 300 letters between Louise and her artist friends and colleagues and her family. The letters are held in the archives of the Museum voor Schone Kunsten Gent.
The presentation, organized by Vrienden van de School van Tervuren (Friends of the Tervuren School), was illustrated by some beautiful Impressionist-style landscape paintings. The Vrienden van de School van Tervuren hopes to include some works by Louise Héger in an exhibition planned for November-December in De Warande Tervuren. That exhibit will focus on works by the Tervuren School, of whom the most famous member was Hippolyte Boulenger.
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Louise was the daughter of Zoë Parent, who founded the school in Brussels that Charlotte and Emily Brontë attended, and of Constantin Héger, her husband who taught there. Louise also attended the school, singing and drawing being her preferred subjects. She would have been just four years old when Charlotte Brontë left at the beginning of 1844, and is thought to have inspired the character Georgette, the youngest of Madame Beck’s children, in Villette.
Louise was determined right from the outset to be an artist even though the prospects for women artists at the time were anything but encouraging. One had to be accompanied/chaperoned when out painting or sketching “en plein air,” making it difficult to get to attractive but remote beauty spots. She was, however, firmly encouraged by her male fellow-artists, which strengthened her resolve.
Gradually she became known and was invited to show her work at various Salons, including in Paris.
Among the slides shown by Sciot was a “Vue de Bruxelles prise du haut de l’Escalier Belliard.” This immediately triggered in my mind the cover of Helen MacEwan’s book “Down the Belliard Steps” — what an amazing coincidence!
Later as Louise became more successful, she travelled (and painted) widely — Norway, Germany, Italy, Switzerland. She bought some land near the village of Coxyde at the Belgian coast and built a villa. Coxyde has named a square in her honour — “Louise Hegerplein.”
She lived a long life, but in her 70s her health started to decline and she moved back to Brussels, where she outlived many of her contemporaries, dying at the age of 94.
One reason why Louise Héger’s work is still not well-known today, although she was a pioneer of Belgian Impressionism, is perhaps due to many of her paintings being in private hands and relatively few on public view in museums.
Her brother, Paul Héger, who became Rector of the Université Libre de Bruxelles and wielded considerable influence among his huge network of friends and colleagues, was instrumental in finding buyers for his sister’s work.
Louise’s character is summed up by her cry “J’ai soif d’un grand ciel” (“I thirst for a big sky”) — the title given by Sciot to her master’s thesis on the artist.
Sciot helped to organise an exhibition on Louise Héger in Leuven in 2011. Professor Sue Lonoff of Harvard University, editor of a compilation of the French essays that Charlotte and Emily wrote for M. Héger while they were in Brussels, gave a talk on Louise at the exhibition.
Rose O’Duffy