Hendrik Beyaert

Hendrik Beyaert (Dutch) or Henri Beyaert (French) was a Belgian architect.

He was born in Kortrijk, Belgium on 29 July 1823 and died in Brussels 22 January 1894. He is considered one of the most important Belgian architects of the 19th-century.

Career

Hendrik Beyaert was of very humble descent. For this reason he had to earn his living from a very young age onwards. Initially he and his family couldn't afford to finance higher studies. At age 19, Hendrik Beyaert worked as a bank employee at the National Bank of Belgium's office in Kortrijk. He found his profession not very indulging and decided to quit the bank. As he had always been fascinated by architecture he found a post as an apprentice stonemason on the building site of the new railway station of Tournai, a building that would be replaced decades later by a design of Hendrik Beyeart himself.

In 1842 the young man went to Brussels where he kept a small bookshop to earn his living and where he enrolled at the Académie to attend the architecture courses. In the following year he met the architect Félix Janlet who believed in the young Beyaert's exceptional qualities and who offered him a job in his office. Due to this job and to a small scholarship granted to him by his native city Kortrijk, Beyaert could finish his architectures studies at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts which he completed in 1846. At the Académie he studied with Tilman-François Suys by whom he was largely influenced during the first years of his career as an independent architect. Beyaert gradually moved away from the neo-classical style if his master and began to experiment with a neo-Louis XVI style in the mansions he built along the Brussels Avenue des Arts and Chaussée de Charleroi.