IN THE LIGHT OF IMPRESSIONISM? – DOMINIQUE LANG, LUXEMBOURG PAINTER

Luxembourg’s Villa Vauban museum continues its excellent series of exhibitions (having already brought us Constable) with a retrospective dedicated to Luxembourg impressionist painter Dominique Lang and his contemporaries (‘Dans la lumière de l’impressionnisme? – Dominique Lang (1847-1919) et ses contemporains’). While Impressionism is associated mostly with France, it also had adherents from, e.g., Germany, Spain, the US, and, as we now discover,  Luxembourg.

Lang was not exclusively an impressionist painter, although it was in that genre that he produced the most: he also painted portraits and made forays into Pointillism and even Symbolism. A feature of this exhibition is the inclusion for comparison and contrast of numerous similar works by other artists from the period, not only from Luxembourg but also from the border regions of Germany and France (Trier, the Moselle) that abut on the Grand Duchy. Nonetheless, Lang is at the centre, and while the exhibition samples his various adoptive genres, pride of place – despite the title’s question mark – would likely go to his impressionist landscapes, executed with a patent sensitivity to nature. especially trees and water.

The paintings shown in the illustrations to this post are all by Lang, except for a lakeside view by his conational Frantz Seimetz. The exhibition includes ample wall descriptions placing Lang’s life and work in context in French, German and English. Visitors to the villa (and its beautiful park) will not be disappointed with the range of works on show, and should come away better informed about a lesser-known but fascinating corner of the grand artistic movement that was Impressionism!