Joseph Borio, Bridge in Brussels, 1872

by Atelier Liesjes

A watercolour of an old corner of Brussels, seen from the water. On the left stands a tall, narrow house with a red tiled roof and three rows of windows; halfway up, a projecting wooden bay window hangs over the canal, supported by sloping struts, with flowers in the window boxes. In the centre, a stone bridge with two arches spans the canal, crowned by a small house with a red gabled roof and small windows. On the right stands a massive, almost solid building of dark stone, also with a red roof and a chimney, in which a few deep window recesses have been carved out. Behind the roofs, against a pale grey sky, even more façades and a church tower are faintly visible. The water at the bottom is grey-green and virtually rippleless; the canal runs under the bridge and disappears into the shadow of the building on the right. Borio worked with fine, transparent layers of watercolour over a barely visible pencil sketch. The colours are soft and weathered: warm grey, ochre, old rose and the red of the roof tiles, each interrupted by the pale blue of the sky. It is a topographical cityscape in the nineteenth-century tradition, but without the dry precision of an engraving: the loose washes and the white of the paper allow light to filter through the alleyways, and the thin pencil lines remain visible beneath the paint in many places. The atmosphere is that of a quiet afternoon in a city not yet torn open by wide boulevards, and people are almost entirely absent. The nineteenth-century Belgian draughtsman and watercolourist Joseph Borio took particular delight in capturing the old streets, bridges and buildings of Brussels. His work belongs to the genre of Romantic cityscapes in which the city’s past is preserved, akin to the watercolours of the Belgian school from that period. He signed this sheet in the bottom left-hand corner with his name. A refined, tranquil piece for a classical or bourgeois interior.