Léon Spilliaert

Léon Spilliaert (1881–1946) was a Belgian artist, born in Ostend, who worked as a draughtsman, illustrator, watercolourist and painter. He is associated with Symbolism and with early Expressionism, and he was largely self-taught: he entered the Bruges Academy of Art in 1899 and left a few months later. Around 1901–1904 he worked in Brussels as an illustrator for the publisher Edmond Deman, who issued Symbolist writers. In 1904 he moved to Paris and met the poet Émile Verhaeren, who became a close friend and supporter. His best-known pictures are sparse, haunting images of empty beaches, the sea, night and solitary figures, made in ink, wash and pastel, such as Self-Portrait with Masks (1903) and Dyke at Night (1908). He married Rachel Vergison in 1916. The first exhibition devoted entirely to his paintings took place in Brussels in 1922. Spilliaert died in Ixelles, near Brussels, in November 1946, aged 65.