Geo Verbanck – “Premiere douleur”

An Art Deco sculpture by Belgian artist Geo Verbanck. It is a project for a grave monument. Presumably design for a bronze statue or one sculpted from stone. A man and a woman mourn the loss of a child lying in the casket between them. Material is patinated plaster.
The sculpture is signed by the artist in capital letters.

About Geo Verbanck
Geo Verbanck was born in Ghent on February 28, 1881. He died on December 12, 1961 at his daughter’s home in Aartselaar. At a young age he started working for a living in the studios of furniture makers and sculptors. At 16 he enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent where he learned to sculpt from live models. In 1905, he studied briefly at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. In 1909 he won the second prize in the Great State Prize for Sculpture, the so-called “Prize of Rome.” From 1911 to 1927, he was professor of sculpture at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Dendermonde and from 1924 to 1941 at the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and Arts, where he trained countless artists and where he ended his career as service director. He was a member of the Municipal Commission for Monuments and Townscapes of Ghent, a correspondence member of the Royal Commission for Monuments and Landscapes, a member of the Sculpture Commission of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, and a member of the Royal Academy of Belgium.

The number of exhibitions and salons at home and abroad at which he exhibited his works can hardly be counted.

His oeuvre is overwhelming: applied arts, free sculpture, funerary monuments, portrait medallions and busts, plaques, monumental sculpture, emergency coins, medals, drawings. In his free sculpture the themes of the child, woman and family predominate. Very often he was asked by renowned architects or by government agencies to integrate bas-reliefs in public buildings.