Paul Delvaux
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. 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, working until near his death 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.
If you own a work by Paul Delvaux
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