Landscape, figure, genre scene painter and art teacher Victor Hageman was born in Antwerp, Belgium in 1868. He lived in Uccle from 1913 and trained at the Antwerp Academy alongside Vincent Van Gogh, whom he recalled as a ‘disheveled [sic], nervous, and restless man who fell like a bomb on the Academy of Antwerp, overwhelming the director, the drawing master, and the students’. Hageman made his exhibiting debut in 1891 and was a co-founder of 'L'Art Contemporain'.
A socially-conscious realist painter, Hageman specialized in studies of migrants and particularly, of his Russian-Jewish neighbours and the inhabitants of the Antwerp Jewish quarter. Victor Hageman died in Belgium in 1940. His work including 'Emigrant and Child' and 'Old Emigrant and child' is held in trust at the Dinant Museum; his work at the Antwerp Museum includes further 'Mother and Child (Emigrants)' and 'Emigrants' compositions, and pastel drawings on these themes are held at the Brussels Museum. His pastoral scenes of Flemish figures are in the Ghent Museum.
