19th century portrait of a lady with a vase of irises. The oil on canvas is signed by the artist Nicolas van den Eeden (1856-1918) and is mounted in a wooden gilt frame. The oil on canvas is a particularly good example of his work. It has recently had a light clean.
 
Eeden was a Belgium artist who worked mainly in Paris. He later moved to Boscombe, Dorset, where he died.
 
He was the son of Louis Van den Eeden, a shoemaker, and Virginie Vervalke. He was the brother of Jan Van den Eeden, a Belgian composer, pianist, conductor, and educator .
 
He studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, where he was a student of Théodore Canneel . He spent several months in Paris studying and painting in museums. Subsequently, he settled in Ghent and then, in 1885, in Brussels.
 
He then executed a series of large paintings on historical or religious subjects which, following exhibitions in Belgium and Paris which were bought for public collections/government buildings. He is listed in Benezit Dictionnaire de Peintres Belge.
 
He was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Namur and was its director from 1900 to 1914.
 
During the First World War, he went into exile in England after the German invasion of Belgium in 1914.