Léon Spilliaert was a Belgian artist, born in Ostend on 28 July 1881 and dead in Brussels on 23 November 1946. He worked almost entirely on paper, in ink wash, watercolour, gouache and pastel. He is remembered for self-portraits drawn at night in mirrors and for views of the Ostend seafront after dark, and he reached a wide public only in 2020, with a show at the Royal Academy in London.
He was an insomniac with a ruined stomach, and he made his subject out of the hours he could not sleep. The faces he drew in those hours are the ones people come looking for.
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In November 1907 he wrote to his publisher, Edmond Deman, that he was a poor interpreter of other people's dreams, because he had too many of his own. Over the next year he drew himself again and again, at night, in rooms lit by a single lamp, his face thrown back at him by mirrors.
The face is hollow and wary. A Belgian journalist of the time called him "quasi-fantastique, Hoffmannesque", and one contemporary remembered cheeks deeply sunken and eyes that were soft and dreamy, with a gloss of cold steel. In one of the sheets he pins down the date with the single digit of a tear-off calendar.
Few buyers wanted them. Jean Milo, who worked for the Brussels dealer Walter Schwarzenberg, recalled that Spilliaert was seen as a "minor master", and the gallery showed him in a secondary space. His reputation only began to grow in the late 1960s.
What You'll Discover
The job he gave at art school.
Who he met in Paris in 1904.
What the calendar says in one self-portrait.
Why a beam of light crosses the bed.
What replaced the sea in his last years.