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Lot Essay
"I loved trains and my nostalgia for them has stayed with me, a memory from youth. I don't attach any special significance to that, nothing to do with departure, but more an expression of a feeling. I paint the trains of my childhood and through them that childhood itself;… the pictures of stations and trains do not represent reality. There remains the strange, a spectacle perhaps? I know that despite the pleasure I have in painting them, railways and stations are somewhat limiting subjects, but wrenching them out of normality has the opposite effect and pushes the subject towards the universal." (cited in Paul Delvaux 1897-1994 exhib. cat. Royal Museum of Fine Arts Belgium, Brussels, 1997, p.27.)
There is no train in Rosine only a level-crossing with its gates closed and the expectation of one. Around this sense of expectation Delvaux has woven a pictorial enigma that includes many of his most typical iconographic elements.
The title of the work refers to the name of the house that Delvaux's parents rented for their summer holiday in La Panne on the north coast of Belgium in 1917, and it is this house that appears at the centre of the painting behind the empty level crossing. As with all of Delvaux's work, the painting is therefore an evocation of the strangeness and intensity of his childhood memories. In order to emphasise the potency of the emotions such memories awake in him and to stress his pervasive sense of wonder at reality Delvaux has populated this enigmatic nocturnal scene with many of the strange personages and visual metaphors from his personal pictorial dictionary. Smartly dressed women naked to the waist, stand like statues of calm eroticism in sober contemplation, while in the shadows of the middle-distance outside the French windows of a townhouse stands the curious figure of Otto Lidenbrock - the geologist from Jules Verne's novel Journey to the Centre of the Earth - who made the first of many appearances in Delvaux's painting in 1939. To the left of the work, behind the two women standing in classical perspective like figures from Piero della Francesca's Flagellation climbs a row of steps that leads up to a seemingly empty picture frame flanked by a similarly framed mirror. These features more than anything else in Delvaux's art announce the fact that everything in the scene depicted is artificial. It is all the product of Delvaux's own unique "Twilight Zone" of the imagination where true reality lies only in the powerful all-pervasive poetry of the painting's silence.
There is no train in Rosine only a level-crossing with its gates closed and the expectation of one. Around this sense of expectation Delvaux has woven a pictorial enigma that includes many of his most typical iconographic elements.
The title of the work refers to the name of the house that Delvaux's parents rented for their summer holiday in La Panne on the north coast of Belgium in 1917, and it is this house that appears at the centre of the painting behind the empty level crossing. As with all of Delvaux's work, the painting is therefore an evocation of the strangeness and intensity of his childhood memories. In order to emphasise the potency of the emotions such memories awake in him and to stress his pervasive sense of wonder at reality Delvaux has populated this enigmatic nocturnal scene with many of the strange personages and visual metaphors from his personal pictorial dictionary. Smartly dressed women naked to the waist, stand like statues of calm eroticism in sober contemplation, while in the shadows of the middle-distance outside the French windows of a townhouse stands the curious figure of Otto Lidenbrock - the geologist from Jules Verne's novel Journey to the Centre of the Earth - who made the first of many appearances in Delvaux's painting in 1939. To the left of the work, behind the two women standing in classical perspective like figures from Piero della Francesca's Flagellation climbs a row of steps that leads up to a seemingly empty picture frame flanked by a similarly framed mirror. These features more than anything else in Delvaux's art announce the fact that everything in the scene depicted is artificial. It is all the product of Delvaux's own unique "Twilight Zone" of the imagination where true reality lies only in the powerful all-pervasive poetry of the painting's silence.