François Roffiaen

Jean François Xavier Roffiaen (9 August 1820, Ypres, West Flanders – 25 January 1898, Ixelles) was a Belgian landscape painter who specialised in painting Alpine landscapes.

In Ypres, the members of the family on his father’s side came from modest origins. The men were day labourers, builders, innkeepers or saddlers and the women were dressmakers or lace makers. Jean Francois, his father (1794–1837) was an upholsterer and his mother, Victoire Félicité (1789–1870), was the daughter of a tradesman from Aire-sur-la Lys (France).

His first marriage took place in Ixelles on 19 November 1847 to Éléonore Bodson from Dinant (1792–1854) and on 14 October 1858 in Louvain he later married Marie Anne Tilly, who bore him a son named Hector (1859–1895). He lived in the Belgian capital from 1847, changing his address several times, from rue aux Herbes Potagères 30 to Saint-Josse-ten-Noode up to 1848, rue Goffart 28 in Ixelles until 1853, chaussée de Wavre 31, also in Ixelles until 1859, chaussée de Charleroi 131 in Saint-Gilles until 1863 and finally rue du Financier, which was renamed a little later to rue Godecharle 16 in Ixelles.

François Roffiaen was barely three years old, when for unknown reasons he went to live with his paternal uncle, Joseph-Louis-Augustin, who was a bookseller in the rue de l’Ange in Namur, the city where he spent, as he himself noted « the most beautiful years of his existence » and where he frequented the Atheneum, as well as the Academy of Painting (1835–1839) under the direction of Ferninand Marinus (1808–1890). Among his fellow students were Louis Bonet (1822–1894), Jean Baptiste Kindermans (1821–1876) and Joseph Quinaux (1822–1895).

He followed his artistic studies at the Academy of Brussels (1839–1842), notably under the famous vedutiste, François Bossuet (1789–1889) who was responsible for teaching him perspective and who was the authority on landscapes and city views. Then he attended the Brussels studio of Pierre-Louis Kühnen (1812–1877), a painter originating from Aix-la-Chapelle, specialised in painting romantic landscapes. Roffiaen received for that reason an annual subsidy of 600 francs, paid by the city of Ypres (1841–1845 or 1846). At the same time, he taught drawing at the college of Dinant. To thank the city of his birth for the support they had given him, he gave a Landscape with Hydraulic Mill (1844), a Waterfall of the Aar in the High Alps and a View from Grütli on Lake Geneva (1857) to the local museum. He also bequeathed a lot later a large Valley of Chamonix to the commune of Ixelles, of which he was on the board of directors since the time of its creation in 1892.

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