In a film directed by Bernard Claeys in 1969, Eugène Leroy opens up about his painting: “I don’t do them one at a time. I do them all together – at least a whole stack of canvases that I live with. And as long as I find gaps in them, I delve deeper into them. They have to become full. They also respond to one another …’. Eugène Leroy speaks candidly about his technique: ‘I can clearly picture this paint—a little oily, a little lumpy, petrified yet full of life—alongside very calm things, things which, on the contrary, give a very abstract impression and may be colourful. My painting, which always tends towards monochromatic tones, starts with vivid colour and gradually becomes enveloped in it; it would go very well with vividly coloured surroundings.”

Valentine was Eugène Leroy’s partner, and later his wife, until her death in 1979. As the artist’s muse, she posed for portraits and nudes in which the subject and the powerful paint blend together. Not that the model’s flesh serves as a justification for the thickness of the paint, but because the painting, with the extreme heaviness of its impasto, seeks to recapture the vital energy that the painter perceives in his beloved. Leroy himself compared Valentine’s importance to his work with the place held by Hendrickje in Rembrandt’s oeuvre. The grounding in life that the woman provides for the artist is equivalent to that which he seeks through his painting. His discovery of Rembrandt at the age of fifteen was decisive in Leroy’s aspiration to become a painter. Around 1943, he reinterpreted Hendrickje bathing in a river: in this work, he captures the light illuminating the flesh from within, the figure emerging from a background to which she is inextricably linked. Whilst the appearance of the work might lead one to describe it as ‘materialist’, Leroy developed his art outside the Parisian art scene of the 1950s, where a style of painting characterised by a heavy, textured impasto was prevalent.