Born in 1873 in Verviers, a Walloon city close to the German border, Le Brun started his artistic education with private lessons in drawing and watercolor. After an intermezzo at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1895, Le Brun continued his training at the La Patte de Dindon, an independent artist's studio established around 1900 with fellow members Firmin Baes and Eugène Laermans. Like many other artists at the end of the nineteenth century in search of the masters of the Golden Age, Le Brun travelled to Holland in 1897, where he became fascinated by Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Pieter de Hooch. In 1900, he travelled through Italy and in 1903 spent two months in Paris. Le Brun published regularly in L’Art moderne and participated in various exhibitions, including La Libre Esthétique. At age forty-one, Le Brun’s career ended abruptly, killed in one of the earliest battles of the First World War on the Western Front in Stuivekenskerke.

In the early part of his career, Le Brun devoted himself to sober depictions of country interiors, recalling the peasant scenes of his predecessor Vincent van Gogh. Similar in introspection, Le Brun searched for the spirituality of simple country life and its dignified farmers. At the same time, the artist absorbed Belgian symbolism, creating eerie empty interiors with doors taking the place for the unknown emanating uncertainty. In contrast to the sun-filled landscapes of the luminists, artists began depicting shadowy nocturnal or twilight scenes in which forms appear to emerge out of darkness. With the Industrial Revolution, a range of new black drawing articles exploded, contributing to a growing awareness of the material qualities of drawing as an object.

With its diffuse lighting and shadowy contours, The Man at the Stove embodies the strange and foreign in the familiar. In the semi-darkness of the dim light, the elongated figure emerges out of darkness, his identity concealed. It is in this visual puzzle revolving around everyday situations that the principle of Symbolism is revealed, namely to perceive and to expect a different, unknown meaning behind every manifestation of reality, the closed door suggesting a further level of events not accessible to the viewer. This quest for darkened realms shepherded new subject matter, such as dream states and non-idealized representations of contemporary life. These eerie, frozen figures located in mysterious interiors represent the loss of absolute certainties as experienced in urban life.