Gustave Serrurier-Bovy, Umkreis

_{Liège, Belgium, 1858 - 1910 Anvers, Belgium}

Gustave Serrurier-Bovy was born in Liège, Belgium, in 1858. There he studied architecture at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1874, where he became interested in the theories of John Ruskin, William Morris und Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc. From 1882 onwards, he worked as an architect with his father, Louis Serrurier, who was a contractor. During this time, he built the neo-Gothic church of the Château de Chaityfontaine in Liège. After the building’s completion, the artist decided to dedicate himself to furniture design, which led him to engage in studies of applied arts in London in 1884, where he came into contact with the Arts and Crafts-Movement. That year he married Maria Bovy, his assistant. Greatly influenced by these new ideas and concepts, he returned to Belgium, where he began to apply what he had learned in his work. Within a short period of time he opened his own atelier in Liège where he produced unique furniture in the Arts and Crafts-spirit. In 1910 Gustave Serrurier-Bovy died in Antwerp.
Next to, for instance, Paul Hankar, Victor Horta und Henry van de Velde, Gustave Serrurier-Bovy is one of the most notable characters in the renewal of interior design in Belgium, who decidedly advanced the European art nouveau movement. His works can be seen in well renowned museums such as the Pairs Musée d’Orsay and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.