After having prepared in the 1960s the art teaching certification, she briefly taught in Strasbourg before coming back to Paris to devote herself only to painting. Since her first shows at the end of the 70s, she has never stopped to produce a work exclusively figurative, feminine and intimist.
Francine Van Hove's painting is based on young women staged in her studio. Her process starts with an idea of subject, translated into graceful poses by her models and refined by many preparatory drawings to verify that it looks natural.
Her everyday life scenes keep a kind of mystery under an apparent simplicity. Out of the constraints of the external world, like an affront, these young women let themselves go to laziness or to enjoy some moments extracted from the passage of time. Unconcerned by their own beauty, they impose by their purely feminine attitudes a mysterious harmony, a kind of fragility too. Her work reflects a feeling of incommunicability and a saving loneliness, like a retreat freely chosen against the unrest of the world.
Influenced by the ancient statuary, the Flemish and Italian Renaissance painting, Francine Van Hove seeks to perpetuate a technical virtuosity close to the one of Old Masters: a painting deliberately smooth like glass that brings a sensation of wonder by the rendering of material and the richness of details.
Regularly shown in Europe and North America, her work is part of many private collections.