Regarded, during his lifetime, as Belgium’s most important marine painter.  Born on November 11, 1819 and brought up in Westcapelle, which is located on the North Sea, he always had a love for the sea.  While at school in Boulogne he signed on as a ship-boy and spent a number of years riding the waves. 

During this period he began to display an interest in painting and decided to travel to Paris – entering the studios of Horace Vernet and Baron J.A.T. Gudin during the 1840’s.  Here he learned the more traditional ways of painting landscape and marine paintings; but his true interest was in light and atmosphere.  With a more atmospheric interest in art, he was always considered one of the more ‘modern’ artists and his work was influential in the development of both the Realist and Impressionist movements.

In the early 1850’s he married the daughter of the director of the Brussels Observatory and moved to Antwerp; where he lived from 1852 – 1856 and it was during this period that his fortunes began to improve.  Clays made his debut at the Salon in 1851 and while he tried to stay in the mainstream his art, which displayed a desire to capture nature ‘as is’, was heralded by those who were looking for change.

In 1856 he, and his family, moved to Brussels and it was from this point that he specialized in scenes along the Scheldt.  He exhibited a number of works at the Exposition Universelle of 1867 and the critic Burger-Thoré described him as one of the greatest marine painters of the time.

In 1868 he became a member of the Société Libre des Beaux-Arts – a society founded on March 1^st, 1868 to help promote the works of artists who were interested in their individual interpretations of Nature. 

Clays was a frequent exhibitor at the many exhibition halls in Europe and exhibited many pieces at the Paris Salon; including: A Clam on the Scheldt, near Flessingue (1868); View of the Scheldt (1875); The North Sea (1876); The Zuyder-Zee, near Texel, in Calm Weather (1877); and  Saardam (1878).

In the July1867 issue of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Paul Mantz writes:

He is Flemish in his manner of painting; and in his choice of landscapes is somewhat like the Dutch.  He does not paint the sea, but the Scheldt where it widens, and those gray and light waters which bear you in a steamer from Moerdyk to Rotterdam.  With a proud feeling for these things, he expresses in the calme plat, in the gros temps, the humidity of the skies of Western Flanders, the sleep of the calmed water, or the caress, sometimes menacing, of the breeze which makes little, uneasy waves shiver around the Koffs loaded to the brim.  The water has found in Clays a marvelously exact painter; he gives it movement, limpidity, life; and, with happy talent, he knows the spots where the sun’s rays cross it to fill it with light.

His important works were, and still are, highly sought after and collectors paid large sums of money to acquire his works during his lifetime.  In 1878, at the Johnston sale, his painting A Marine, Dutch Shipping was sold for $3,550.

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