The Ypres born François Roffiaen (1820-1898) was a landscape painter who specialised in Alpine landscapes and its surroundings. En Plein Air he drew his studies in oil, pencil, brush and watercolour. At the age of three he went to live with his uncle, Joseph-Louis-Augustin, who was a bookseller in Namur where François went to Grammar School and the Academy of Painting (1835-1839) followed by the Academy of Brussels under François Bossuet (1789-1889). François completed his studies at the studio of Pierre-Louis Kühnen (1812-1877) in Brussels. Inspired by Alexandre Calame (1810-1864) with whom he spent six months in Geneva in 1864, he fell in love with the Alpine landscape. His international commissions brought him the title Chevalier de l'Ordre de Léopold in 1869.
Introduced in his early childhood to the domain of Natural Sciences by Jules Colbeau (1823-1881), François also acclaimed fame for his achievements in Malacology (Molluscs) as one of the founding members of the Malacological Society of Belgium.
Already during his lifetime paintings by Roffiaen were very much sought after and works by the artist are represented in the collections of musea in Antwerp, Brussels, Ypers, Namur and prominent private-collectors in Buffalo, Chicago, New York, The Hague, London and Cambridge as well as the collections of Queen Victoria (a Birthday present given by her husband Prince Albert) and the Shah of Persia.[1]
The relatively flat landscape of the present En Plein Air study of clouds could very well be made in Genck and surroundings, where Roffiaen panited often. Although we have studied numerous paintings by Roffiaen, unfortunately thus far we haven't been able yet to localize a painting where this study might have been used for.
This 1840 dated splendid Cloud Study closely follows in the tradition of the numerous Cloud Studies made by John Constable (1776-1837) in Hampstead in 1821/22 in order to record the varying weather conditions at different times of day and is a predecessor of the same subject executed by Eugène Boudin (1824-1898) in the 1850's and later on.
[1] Jan Dewilde, François Roffiaen 182-1898, Schetsen uit de carrière van een landschapsschilder.
Dienst Stedelijke Musea, Iper, 1998.
