Charles van den Eycken was raised in a family where both his father and grandfather were painters. Not surprisingly, he received his earliest art education under their guidance. Born in Antwerp on April 17, 1859, the young artist grew up at a time when his home town was emerging from the economic and political aftermath of decades of upheaval, first from the Napoleonic wars and then from the revolution of 1830 which resulted in the formation of Belgium as an independent nation.

By the time that van den Eycken was ready to begin his career as a painter, Belgium was a reasonably stable and constitutional monarchy.??In the mid-1870s, he moved to Brussels to continue his education at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts where he studied w...