Xavier de Callataÿ, a baron in his native Belgium, was born February 11, 1932, in Brussels. He earned a degree with honors in metallurgical engineering from the University of Louvain, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts there, and later earned a master's degree from the University of Utah.

In the early 1950s, de Callataÿ worked in Utah on a team building rocket nose cones. Disliking the destructive nature of the project, he raised money to leave by painting and selling portraits of friends.

He lived in New Orleans from the late 1950s into the early 1970s, according to his former wife, Alexandra Monett. Among his first works to attract attention was a series of paintings of Preservation Hall musicians, according to Dotty Coleman, owner of the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts, where he taught. His work was exhibited in galleries in New Orleans, New York City, and Florida and is held in private collections as well as those of Tulane University, the Union League Club of New York City, the Chester Dale Collection in Washington, D.C., and the Palais de la Nation in Brussels.

His New Orleans subjects also included huge murals for the Greater New Orleans Tourist and Convention Commission's offices at Royal and Conti streets. The murals became a cause célèbre in the mid-1980s when plans were announced to replace them after the Police Department took over the building.

“Xavier was a great draftsman, and his works were truly beautiful,” said William Fagaly, an assistant director of the New Orleans Museum of Art.

De Callataÿ's last New Orleans exhibition, Symphony for Christine, was held at the New Orleans Museum of Art in January 1994. The four mural-size paintings honored a New Orleans friend who worked with Mother Teresa's religious order and later died by suicide. “It was a very personal thing for him,” Fagaly said.

De Callataÿ moved to New York in the mid-1970s. In 1998, while traveling to Venice to create paintings for a friend's book, he became ill and was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. He returned to his native Belgium and died in La Hulpe on December 27, 1998.