Paul Delvaux valuation
Belgian Surrealist of moonlit stations, classical temples and sleepwalking women.
Paul Delvaux was born in Belgium in 1897, trained as an architect before painting, and found his subject in the mid-1930s after seeing de Chirico and, at a Brussels fair, a display of anatomical waxworks.
What a work by Paul Delvaux is worth
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Bio
Paul Delvaux was born in Belgium in 1897, trained as an architect before painting, and found his subject in the mid-1930s after seeing de Chirico and, at a Brussels fair, a display of anatomical waxworks. From then on he painted the same dream almost without variation: nude or half-dressed women, unmoving and unsurprised, in classical colonnades, moonlit streets and above all railway stations, painted with the dry precision of an architectural drawing. He kept his distance from the Surrealist group and outlived nearly all of it, painting until 1989 and dying in 1994 at ninety-six.
Delvaux painted slowly and the oils on canvas or panel are relatively scarce; the market is led by the 1940s and early 1950s pictures. There is a large body of drawings, watercolours and gouaches, and here attribution requires care because studies for well-known compositions have been extensively copied. The Fondation Paul Delvaux at Saint-Idesbald holds the archive and the catalogue raisonne of paintings, and any significant work should be checked against it. Lithographic editions from the 1960s and later are numerous and are a separate, modest market.
Saint-Idesbald, the murals and the museum
Delvaux's first solo exhibition was in Brussels in 1925, and in January 1945 the Palais des Beaux-Arts gave him a retrospective of 57 large canvases. He and Tam, whom he married in 1952, built a house and studio in the dunes at Saint-Idesbald on the Belgian coast. He also painted murals, among them Le paradis terrestre at the Palais des Congrès in Brussels in 1959 and Le Voyage légendaire of 1974, now at the casino in Knokke.
The Paul Delvaux Foundation was set up in 1974, and the Paul Delvaux Museum opened at Saint-Idesbald in 1982. The catalogue of the paintings by Michel Butor, Jean Clair and Suzanne Houbart-Wilkin was published in 1975. After Tam's death in December 1989 he stopped working altogether, so a work dated after that year is not by him.
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