Dominique Lang (1874–1919) was born on 15 April 1874 in Dudelange, in the south of Luxembourg, into a family of well-to-do farmers. He showed a talent for drawing from an early age and in 1895 left for Antwerp to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where he was strongly influenced by the British Pre-Raphaelites. A state grant later took him to Florence and Rome for four months.
Back in Dudelange Lang painted the fourteen Stations of the Cross for the parish church, one of his best-known works, and he worked as a drawing teacher in Luxembourg and Esch-sur-Alzette from 1911. He is regarded as Luxembourg’s most important Impressionist, painting portraits and landscapes of the villages around his home, such as Dudelange, Schifflange and Bettembourg, with brisk brushwork and strong light. In his last years he suffered from severe migraines and almost total blindness, and his final paintings of 1918–19 return to Symbolism, interpreted in an Impressionist style.
Lang died in Schifflange on 22 June 1919, at the age of 45, and is buried in his native Dudelange.