Le paysage ténébreux, la mer menaçante, la nuit fébrile - selected work of Léon Spilliaert

Digue et plage, Chalet Royal et galeries d'Ostende, circa 1908-1909.

Digue de mer, 1908.

 Paysage nocturne, poteau de signalisation, 1907.

Ostend, Hofstraat, 1908.

Attente, 1902.

 La Proposition, circa 1900-1903.

Le Dirigeable dans son hangar, 1910.

Maison sur la digue, 1907.

Untitled, 1904.

La Nuit, 1908.

Plage au clair de lune, marine avec lumière, 1908.

 Vertige, l'escalier magique, 1908.

Faune au clair de lune, 1900.

2 novembre (intérieur), 1908.

Le Vieux phare au crépuscule, 1901.

Digue d'Ostende aux réverbères, 1908.

*

Ten self-portraits. 1907.

1902. In February of 1902, as this is dated, Spilliaert was twenty years old.

1903.

1906.

1907.

1907.

1908.

1908.

1908.

1908.

Léon Spilliaert (28 July 1881, Ostend – 23 November 1946, Brussels), Belgian symbolist painter and graphic artist. The oldest of a perfumer's seven children, he displayed an interest in art from childhood. He was primarily self-taught as an artist; often ill as a child, he spent much of his youth sketching the landscape around his home. When he was twenty-one, he went to Brussels to work as an illustrator for Edmond Deman, a publisher of the works of symbolist authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Émile Verhaeren, Stephane Mallarmé, and Maurice Maeterlinck, writing for which the moodiness and stylization of Spilliaert's paintings and drawings was perfectly suited. In 1904 he visited Paris and was much influenced by the artists he met there; he would continue to spend most winters in Paris.

During his late twenties, back living in Ostend with his parents and suffering from insomnia, the result of a stomach ulcer, he became something of a nocturnal wanderer. His nighttime walks about the sleeping town resulted in many of the images featured here.

 Le Phare d'Ostende , 1908.