Jean-François Portaels or Jan Portaels (1818 – 1895) was a Belgian painter of genre scenes, biblical stories, landscapes, portraits and orientalist subjects.
He was also a teacher and director of the Academy of Fine Arts of Ghent and the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. He is regarded as the founder of the Belgian Orientalist school. He was praised in his time as the premier painter of 'everyday elegance and feminine grace'. Through his art, teaching and his leadership of the Académie Royale in Brussels he exerted an important influence on the next generation of Belgian artists, including his pupil Théo van Rysselberghe.
Portaels was a prolific artist who practised many genres: history painting, portraiture, Orientalist art, genre art and landscape painting. While his main focus was on Orientalist art and portraiture, he was in demand as a painter of biblical scenes and his works can still be found in many churches in Belgium such as in the Saint Jacques-sur-Coudenberg in Brussels and the Onze-Lieve-Vrouw van Goede Hoop Church in Vilvoorde. For the latter he painted a tryptich on the story of the Visitation, i.e. the visit of Mary to Elizabeth. Stylistically he remained immune to the main artistic currents in European and Belgian art of his time: the Classicism of his master Navez and the Romanticism of his second master Delaroche. Instead, he created his own style which was characterised by its charm and elegant grace, which are at the basis of their success
Portaels remained removed from the conventions of his time in the way he treated his subjects, as exemplified in his classic vision of the exotic theme of the Oriental woman. He returned numerous times to the aesthetic type of the 'Oriental woman' which he depicted with typically arched eyebrows and languid, almond-shaped eyes. These works are executed in a rather stiff manner. Only in his rare portraits of children did he attain more spontaneity such as in the Portrait of a young Arabic girl (At Jean Moust Gallery). Portaels is seen as the principal painter who led the fashion for Orientalism in Belgium.
Portaels eminent place in the history of contemporary Belgian art is due to his influence as a teacher of the next generation of Belgian artists such as Belgian painters Emile Wauters, Théo van Rysselberghe, Edouard Agneesens, Léon Frédéric, Jef Leempoels, Isidore Verheyden, Alfred Verhaeren, Antoine Van Hammée, Ernest Blanc-Garin, Jean Mayné, Josse Impens, Vanden Kerkhoven, Henri Vanderhecht, Eugène Joseph Adolphe Van Gelder, Fernand Toussaint, Louis Maeterlinck, Jacques de Lalaing, Jakob Smits, André Hennebicq, Camille Van Mulders, Anton Lacroix, Franz Meerts, Sophie Pir, Emile Charlet, Léon Houyoux, Dutch painters Jan Toorop and the Oyens brothers, the French painter Fernand Cormon, the sculptor Charles van der Stappen and the architects Ernest Van Humbeeck and Charles Licot.
