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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.’ – Paul Delvaux (quoted in Paul Delvaux 1897–1994, exh. cat., Royal Museum of Fine Arts Belgium, Brussels, 1997, p. 27)
A night train glides through a silent suburban landscape, opening a window onto Belgian Surrealist Paul Delvaux’s inner world. Faubourg, an everyday urban fringe, is recast as one of his iconic dreamlike nocturnal cities, crystallising the quintessential Delvauxian vision: Surrealism staged under a lucid, theatrical light that follows the associative logic of dream and liminal space. Long shadows and empty vistas give the painting its air of alienation, quiet melancholy and nostalgic wonder. Painted in 1956, the same year Delvaux was elected to the Académie royale de Belgique, placing him among the nation’s most distinguished artists and under Belgian royal patronage, Faubourg has appeared at several prestigious institutions, including the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium and the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art, where it was exhibited at the Belgian Pavilion of the fourth São Paulo Art Biennial in 1957. Exhibited internationally over three decades, Faubourg has remained a significant and enduring picture within Delvaux’s oeuvre.
Born in 1897, Paul Delvaux spent his childhood amid the wonders of the technological revolution (1869–1914) and marvelled at the imagination and inventions of the era. The sights and sounds of tramcars traversing the streets of Brussels were among Delvaux’s fondest early memories. As a boy he dreamt of becoming a station-master, and among his favourite early subjects as an aspiring painter were the railway lines that traversed the Gare du Quartier Léopold in Brussels. He had an overriding passion for Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), whose fantastical world and the illustrations made by Édouard Riou deeply influenced the mysterious poetics of his art.
Those childhood impressions were joined in later life by the half-hidden trains that skirt the horizon in the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, Delvaux’s favourite modern painter, whom he called the ‘poet of emptiness…because he suggested that poem of silence and absence’ (Paul Delvaux, quoted in M. Rombaut, Delvaux, Barcelona, 1990, p. 14). De Chirico’s steam trains entering towns along the skyline, his deserted architecture, and a metaphysical mood produced without overt fantasy gave Delvaux a language for hush and expectancy. The locomotives and carriages he preferred, here as in de Chirico, are not modern electric cars but engines of the turn of the century or earlier. ‘The old steam machines had something human, when they started with their power,’ he explained. ‘I believe that the steam machine fits a painting much better. I believe it has a certain ‘oldness’ and this ‘oldness’ has become customary in my work’ (Paul Delvaux, quoted in Z. Barthelman and J. van Deun, Paul Delvaux: Odyssey of a Dream, Saint-Idesbald, 2007, p. 45).
Delvaux’s architectural training and his contact with Italian Quattrocento painting in the late 1930s are reflected in the measured perspective and stage-like space of the scenery, while the use of panel further supports an enamel-like, architectural finish. Despite being set entirely at night, the scene remains fully lit. Natural and artificial light work together to produce a theatrical, subliminal world in which every element is visible, and long shadows fall with deliberate precision. The dim glow of moonlight is reflected upon a row of houses, before which a train seemingly passes yet remains frozen. In the vacant foreground, three small trees stand in almost ceremonial stillness. The broken fence has been read as the line between the physical world and Delvaux’s ‘twilight’ interiors of recollection. The thin crescent moon sits above the stillness, an emblem of this world’s subconscious connection to the artist’s childhood memory.
Recalling fondly more than eighty years on, the trams and trains of Brussels still moved through his heart. Those magnificent machines, which had first filled him with such thrill and wonder, would remain with Delvaux for the rest of his life: ‘On the first floor there was a balcony and on the balcony, I remember it clearly, I watched the first electric trams go past. Then I would imitate those trams with brushes. I would move the brushes along the balcony rail imitating the trams I saw go past at the end of the street in the rue de la Régence. I was three then, it was 1900. All those images that entered my head at that time remained and I watched the trams in Brussels because the trams were part of the mobile furniture of the streets of Brussels. As important as a house, a monument, a public square or any other urban element’ (Paul Delvaux speaking in Paul Delvaux: the Sleepwalker of Saint Idesbald, a film by Adrian Maben). In Faubourg those images return. A suburban night, a passing train, and the revelation that painting, as he told Jacques Meuris, could have a meaning of its own.
A night train glides through a silent suburban landscape, opening a window onto Belgian Surrealist Paul Delvaux’s inner world. Faubourg, an everyday urban fringe, is recast as one of his iconic dreamlike nocturnal cities, crystallising the quintessential Delvauxian vision: Surrealism staged under a lucid, theatrical light that follows the associative logic of dream and liminal space. Long shadows and empty vistas give the painting its air of alienation, quiet melancholy and nostalgic wonder. Painted in 1956, the same year Delvaux was elected to the Académie royale de Belgique, placing him among the nation’s most distinguished artists and under Belgian royal patronage, Faubourg has appeared at several prestigious institutions, including the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium and the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art, where it was exhibited at the Belgian Pavilion of the fourth São Paulo Art Biennial in 1957. Exhibited internationally over three decades, Faubourg has remained a significant and enduring picture within Delvaux’s oeuvre.
Born in 1897, Paul Delvaux spent his childhood amid the wonders of the technological revolution (1869–1914) and marvelled at the imagination and inventions of the era. The sights and sounds of tramcars traversing the streets of Brussels were among Delvaux’s fondest early memories. As a boy he dreamt of becoming a station-master, and among his favourite early subjects as an aspiring painter were the railway lines that traversed the Gare du Quartier Léopold in Brussels. He had an overriding passion for Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), whose fantastical world and the illustrations made by Édouard Riou deeply influenced the mysterious poetics of his art.
Those childhood impressions were joined in later life by the half-hidden trains that skirt the horizon in the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, Delvaux’s favourite modern painter, whom he called the ‘poet of emptiness…because he suggested that poem of silence and absence’ (Paul Delvaux, quoted in M. Rombaut, Delvaux, Barcelona, 1990, p. 14). De Chirico’s steam trains entering towns along the skyline, his deserted architecture, and a metaphysical mood produced without overt fantasy gave Delvaux a language for hush and expectancy. The locomotives and carriages he preferred, here as in de Chirico, are not modern electric cars but engines of the turn of the century or earlier. ‘The old steam machines had something human, when they started with their power,’ he explained. ‘I believe that the steam machine fits a painting much better. I believe it has a certain ‘oldness’ and this ‘oldness’ has become customary in my work’ (Paul Delvaux, quoted in Z. Barthelman and J. van Deun, Paul Delvaux: Odyssey of a Dream, Saint-Idesbald, 2007, p. 45).
Delvaux’s architectural training and his contact with Italian Quattrocento painting in the late 1930s are reflected in the measured perspective and stage-like space of the scenery, while the use of panel further supports an enamel-like, architectural finish. Despite being set entirely at night, the scene remains fully lit. Natural and artificial light work together to produce a theatrical, subliminal world in which every element is visible, and long shadows fall with deliberate precision. The dim glow of moonlight is reflected upon a row of houses, before which a train seemingly passes yet remains frozen. In the vacant foreground, three small trees stand in almost ceremonial stillness. The broken fence has been read as the line between the physical world and Delvaux’s ‘twilight’ interiors of recollection. The thin crescent moon sits above the stillness, an emblem of this world’s subconscious connection to the artist’s childhood memory.
Recalling fondly more than eighty years on, the trams and trains of Brussels still moved through his heart. Those magnificent machines, which had first filled him with such thrill and wonder, would remain with Delvaux for the rest of his life: ‘On the first floor there was a balcony and on the balcony, I remember it clearly, I watched the first electric trams go past. Then I would imitate those trams with brushes. I would move the brushes along the balcony rail imitating the trams I saw go past at the end of the street in the rue de la Régence. I was three then, it was 1900. All those images that entered my head at that time remained and I watched the trams in Brussels because the trams were part of the mobile furniture of the streets of Brussels. As important as a house, a monument, a public square or any other urban element’ (Paul Delvaux speaking in Paul Delvaux: the Sleepwalker of Saint Idesbald, a film by Adrian Maben). In Faubourg those images return. A suburban night, a passing train, and the revelation that painting, as he told Jacques Meuris, could have a meaning of its own.