Fred Bogaertsartist • painter • watercolourist • draughtsmanSchaarbeek (België) 1882-1963 Lier (België)

Alfred ‘Fred’ Bogaerts was a Flemish painter who only started drawing and painting at a later age. His father was a talented decorative painter and hoped that his son would follow in his footsteps, but Bogaerts, apart from a few drawing lessons, chose a different direction. He trained as a teacher at the Rijksnormaalschool in Lier and started teaching in 1903. Bogaerts was a socially committed man and was active in the Flemish activist movement during the First World War. In November 1918, he fled to the Netherlands together with his wife and the writer-poet Felix Timmermans. Timmermans introduced him to the upper classes and Bogaerts soon became familiar with the typical Dutch customs and atmosphere. He had also started drawing in earnest, a gift that he would develop and perfect autodidactically. Homesickness for his native region, De Lier, was his great driving force. His friend Timmermans said about this: ‘Without his journey to Holland, without this homesickness for his city and country, he would certainly never have started painting’. In pencil and pastel he made nostalgic prints for De Haagsche Post, De Groene Amsterdammer and other publications. For the insurance company Mercator he made the two-year Reinaert de Vos Kalender 1936-1937. With his drawings Bogaerts gave a humorous-realistic view of people in his prints – due to his experiences during the First World War, these were the socially weak; admittedly with a caricatural undertone, but always marked by the tragedy of war. He only returned to Belgium after the 'extinction law' of 1929 and lived there from his drawing and painting. From 1932 until his retirement in 1942 he was a teacher at the Jewish school in Antwerp.