September Night, 1901

After he had undertaken trips to Africa and America in his youth, the Antwerp painter Frans Hens was, together with Emile Claus and Theodoor Verstraete, co-founder of the Antwerp artists' association 'Les XIII' in 1891. This group mirrored the progressive character of the Brussels avant-garde association 'Les XX' and opposed the rather traditional 'If I can'. Around this time, as a painter of the Scheldt, he worked from a boat. From the pleinairism of the Kalmthout school, Hens evolved to an impressionism in the line of Guillaume Vogels and Louis Artan. With rather realistic means, he managed to evoke the specific atmosphere of the moist translucency of mists. His oeuvre is characterised by a certain form of melancholy. He painted mainly during mist, rain and fall, or as here at the end of summer, when the low sun casts long coloured shadows in subdued tones.