Charles Hermans was a Belgian painter. He was born into a bourgeois family, but that status never hindered his artistic aspirations. In Brussels, Hermans was a pupil of the painters François-Joseph Navez and Louis Gallait, and then he went through the workshop St. Luc in Brussels. It was a workshop that was a free alternative to traditional academic education.

Between 1858 and 1861, he studied with the painter Charles Gleyre at the Ecole Centrale des Beaux-Arts, an art school official Paris. From 1862 to 1867 , Hermans remained in Italy, where he became fascinated by the monastic life of Rome, the monks being for him, a scrupulous observer, a favorite subject of many paintings of 1866 to 1869 . He later several mor...