"La Beguinage" Framed Oil on Canvas
2202-09278
(Click the Item No. for an inquiry)29 x 32 including frame
Price: $1,190.00
Location : Baton Rouge
This work by Andre LaPorte was painted in 1938 of a beguinage, a self-contained village within a village that housed young women working to become nuns in the nearby convent. Today the relatively rare surviving beguinages are being preserved by historical societies in Europe. In this work, the subject was such a grouping of houses in Kortryk, Belgium, and the structures are assumed to be at least 200 to 250 years of age.
A beguinage comprises a courtyard surrounded by small dwellings. It is often encircled by a wall and secluded from the town proper by one or two gates. Poor and elderly beguines were housed here by benefactors.
The first beguinages were set up in the 12th century in what has subsequently become the French speaking part of Belgium (Lige). Bguinages are to be found in an area roughly corresponding with present-day Northern and North-Eastern France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Western and North-Western Germany.
The beguines were a religious movement of women. Their success, according to the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne, was due to a surplus of women occasioned by violence, war, military and semi-military operations, which took the lives of many men. Great numbers of women had no option but to unite and collectively secure the aid of rich benefactors.
Circa 1938.
