Painter, designer and sculptor, brother of Octave Van Rysselberghe.
He was enrolled in the Academie van Beeldende Kunsten in Ghent at an early age. In 1879 he became a pupil of Jean-François Portaels, director of the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, whose Orientalist works he admired. Van Rysselberghe first exhibited at the Salon in Brussels in 1881. The next year he won a travelling scholarship and, following in the footsteps of Portaels, visited Spain and Morocco. With fellow artists Darío de Regoyos and Constantin Meunier, Van Rysselberghe recorded picturesque scenes of everyday life. He exhibited these Mediterranean pictures in 1883 at L’Essor. He attended the historic meeting on 28 October 1883 at which the avant-garde exhibition society Les XX was created, and at their exhibition in 1885 he showed the results of a second Moroccan trip, including the exotic Fantasia (Brussels, Mus. A. Mod.).