Modeste Jean LHOMME (1883-1946): « La Meuse à Chokier »  (Engis-Liège-Seraing)

Modeste-Jean Lhomme, born February 20, 1883 in the Outremeuse district of Liège, where he died November 19, 1946, was a Belgian landscape painter.
Son of Jean Pierre Joseph Lhomme, cigar maker in Liège, and Marie Josephe Schruyers, Modeste-Jean began at the will of his father in the workshop of a painting contractor in Liège. He did his entire schooling at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Liège and was trained in painting by the masters Adrien de Witte, Évariste Carpentier and Auguste Donnay. He first turned to landscape painting. Admirer of Auguste Renoir, he set up his easel in the region of Basse-Meuse then that of the Ardennes where he lived for a time. It mainly represents views of the valleys of the Lesse, the Aisne or the Semois, both Belgian and French. Here he meets the artists Albert Raty, Marie Howet. 1913-1914, he participated in the general exhibition of the Cercle des Beaux-Arts and in the Salon of the Royal Society of Fine Arts in Liège. His first private exhibition took place in Liège in 1916. In 1919, a painting entitled Soleil d'August caught the attention of Parisian municipal councilors who hired him to exhibit in Paris. In Brussels, he exhibited for the first time in 1920 and met with success there since the Government acquired his triptych Panorama de Francorchamps. At the triennial salon of Namur in 1924, his painting Vallée de la Molignée, noticed by the Belgian sovereigns, entered the municipal collections. At the exhibitions organized at the art gallery of the newspaper La Meuse in Liège in January 1925 and 1926, alongside Élysée Fabry in particular, he was noticed and praised by Richard Heintz. In the 1930s, he presented his paintings in France, at the L'Ardenne Wallonne en peinture exhibition in Mézières in 1932 and at the Union Artistique des Ardennes show in Charleville in 1933. Many works are in the hands of collections private, and others are kept in the museums of Liège, Namur, Tournai