Project Description

Oil on panel
Dimensions : 27 cm x 20.7 cm

Sign top left : F.Seimetz - Munich dated 1884

The beer drinker

Frantz Seimetz

(21.04.1858 Grevenmacher Luxembourg – 26.10.1934 Limpertsberg – Luxembourg)

Carter's son, Frantz Seimetz reportedly sold his first oil painting at the age of sixteen. After upper primary school in Grevenmacher, he practices decoration and painting and settles in 1881 as a freelance artist in Luxembourg city, where he frequents a circle of young artists and intellectuals. Let us quote among others Albert Rodange (son of Michel), Batty Weber and Antoine Pescatore.

The latter will become the patron of the young Frantz, encouraged and helped him to pursue painting studies in Trier, Brussels, Paris (Higher School of Fine Arts) and Munich (Academy of visual art) from 1879 at 1887.

Fin 1887, Frantz goes to America thanks to a ticket that the honorary consul of the United States in Luxembourg gives him in exchange for a portrait. He visits New York, stay in mexico, spent several years in Dubuque – Iowa and traveled for five months aboard a houseboat on the Mississippi, then goes to Canada and returns to Luxembourg at the end of 1896 where he presents his American landscape paintings during a major exhibition at the Casino bourgeois in Luxembourg.

After having lived in various localities in the Grand Duchy and in Arlon, he moved to Luxembourg in 1923 and makes more or less long stays abroad, especially in Munich, in Alsace, in Provence, in Switzerland and Italy. Frantz Seimetz’s pictorial work consists mostly of oil paintings, watercolors and sketches of popular scenes, portraits and many landscapes.

In 1921, he illustrates in collaboration with Auguste Trémont the third edition of Renert by Michel Rodange.

In the last years of his life, Frantz Seimetz, whose eyesight is weakening, abandons painting for writing and realizes Der Feuersalamander (The terrestrial salamander)

He was the only painter, with Dominique Lang, who shares the title of first impressionist of the Grand Duchy. He will also have launched, outdoor pictorial practice and, with its Moselle landscapes, he was the only artist to succeed in living from his canvases – surely because of the support of his patron, industrialist and minister Antoine Pescatore. He is credited with the creation of more than 1000 works, an atypical character, recognizable with his cape and hat, fond of travels from his studies and whose old adventures have left the traces of a joyful and piquant figure, with multiple nicknames and a keen sense of derision.

Grand Duke Adolphe Prize – 1904 shared with the dudelangeois painter Dominique Lang
“From the Moselle to the whole world, the painter Frantz Seimetz (1858-1934)», Villa Vauban exhibition, Luxembourg city, of 18 January 25 May 2014

Sources : Le quotidien luxembourgeois - Gregory Cimatti, Georgette Bisdorff, Zeinting of the Luxembourgish people – Giulio-Enrico Pisani.

Another work is offered to you by the Gallery.