Sculptor. Born at Feluy in Belgium, he trained as a jobbing stone carver from an early age, and travelled to Brussels to work on the new Palais de Justice. In 1879 he entered the Académie royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and in 1880 enrolled on a course in decorative drawing at the Académie des Beaux-Arts de Saint-Josse-ten-Noode. In 1889 he trained under Charles van der Stappen, and travelled to France. From the early 1890s Rousseau became identified with the Belgian symbolist movement, and worked in collaboration with the art nouveau architect, Victor Horta. He exhibited work in 1895 and 1897 with the group La Libre Esthétique, and was a founder member of the group Pour I’Art, with whom, in 1902, he exhibited the three figure composition Sisters of Illusion (1901), now in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Rousseau spent the war years (1914-9) in London, and after the war completed the Belgian Memorial in Gratitude to Great Britain, unveiled on the Embankment in 1920. After the war Rousseau went on to erect important public monuments in Belgium: the War Memorial at Forest (1921), and the City of Brussels’s Monument to Charles Buls and Émile Demot, inaugurated in 1928. A project for a Memorial to César Franck for Liege (1923) never came to fruition. Compared to the extreme fluidity and lyricism of the earlier work, Rousseau’s late style is comparatively austere. In his old age he devoted much of his time to the writing of poetry and critical studies.
Bibliography: J. Van Lennep (ed.), La Sculpture Belge au 19ème Siècle (2 vols), Brussels, 1990; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. xxxviii, 307, 353–55, 465.
Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011
Adolf Eckstein, Portrait of Victor Rousseau, c.1900, published in ‘La Belgique d’aujourd’hui’ (photo: public domain via Wikimedia Commons)
