Willem Thans artwork • painting • for sale Sleeping woman by candle light

Willem Thans, self-taught, was born in 1816 in Rotterdam and probably moved to Belgium in the 1940s, where he lived and worked in Brussels for years. He specialized in figures and genre performances by candlelight and torchlight, which were admired by contemporaries. There were few figure painters in his time who mastered the art of what was called clair-obscur painting.