Mrs Stessels (Wijnegem) a keen genealogist is researching her female ancestors. She remembered two family portraits donated to the Sterckshof museum in Deurne in the early 1960’s. The portraits painted in 1855 by Jean- Baptiste Taquin (1823-1905), a painter and photographer from Namur are now part of the historical collection of the Fashion Museum in Antwerp.

Mrs Stessels visited our storage last week and she could identify the sitters as Ferdinand Henri Joseph De Reul De Faulx (1812 Faulx Mozet – 1870 Leuven) and his wife Félicitée Joseph Duvivier (Faulx Mozet 1823 – Kuregem 1899). They owned the castle of Faulx Le Tombe near Namur and are depicted as a fashionable couple. Her green and black silk dress with pagoda sleeves and a front and ruff in cotton embroidery is particularly handsome and reminiscent of several costumes in our collection. Very moving is a photograph of the couple probably taken a short time before Ferdinand Henri died in 1870.