By the time he turned twenty, Schlobach was already an active and prominent member of the Belgian avant-garde. In 1884, with several other Belgian artists, he expressed his dissatisfaction with the conservative status quo that dominated the Paris salons by founding a new movement, the Cercle des XX.
Schlobach’s involvement with the Cercle exposed him to many different artistic movements, including impressionism, neo-impressionism, symbolism and art nouveau. He was profoundly influenced by neo-impressionism, more specifically luminism, which espoused a precise and complex approach to representing light and objects. This painting of a lake, executed in 1920, is remarkable for its light effects and the atmosphere it evokes. It illustrates the artist’s faithfulness to that characteristically Belgian style. Willy Schlobach attended the Fine Arts Academy in his native city of Brussels. From 1884 to 1887 he lived in England, where he discovered Turner and the symbolism of the Pre-Raphaelites.
After returning to Belgium, he became a close friend of Théo Van Rysselberghe. Both were founding members of the Cercle des XX, an association of Belgian painters and sculptors formed in January 1884 in reaction to academicism. During its ten first years of existence, the Cercle organised exhibitions, to which it frequently invited foreign artists, including Seurat, Pissaro and Signac in 1887. These three artists’s paintings provoked vehement debate among the Belgian artists, who held vastly divergent views about neo-impressionism. Théo Van Rysselberghe and Willy Schlobach expressed admiration for the art of the Divisionists, whereas others openly mocked it. Every evening, after the exhibition had closed for the day, Seurat spent hours in the cafés, gradually converting the public to his "new faith".
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