Pont Vital Keuller - Spa

Along the Promenade d'Orléans , four small rustic bridges span the Sauvenière River.

The first bridge you cross as you approach the Promenade via Sous-Bois is dedicated to Vital Keuller (1866-1945). This French-born artist of Belgian parents, who lived near Antwerp, spent a few weeks at the source of Sauvenière for some twenty years.

He lived in Ostend in the years before 1914. He became artistic director of the "Cercle Artistique d'Ostende". He fled to England at the outbreak of the First World War, but did not return to Ostend for long after the war. First he crossed Brittany, the Ardennes and the Kempen.

His later career was mainly in Sint-Mariaburg near Antwerp where he had a villa with a studio. He lived his last years with his second wife in Schaarbeek, where he painted exclusively landscapes.

Willem Vandenameele