Portrait of Emile Verhaeren

Van Rysselberghe's 1915 portrait of Emile Verhaeren is one of the last and most significant images of the great Belgian Symbolist poet, who would die in a tragic railway accident in 1916. Now in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, the portrait commemorates a friendship and intellectual partnership that had lasted since the Les XX years of the 1880s. Verhaeren — whose poetry moved from Symbolism toward a visionary celebration of industrial modernity — was one of Van Rysselberghe's closest friends and a central figure in the Belgian avant-garde. By 1915, in the context of the German occupation of Belgium and the wartime exile of many Belgian intellectuals, a portrait of Verhaeren carried patriotic as well as personal significance. Van Rysselberghe had moderated his strict divisionism by this date and could bring a more painterly, direct approach to the sitter's face and bearing.

Van Rysselberghe's late portraits move away from strict divisionism toward a more synthetic application that can convey the specific character of an individual face more directly. The sitter's intellectual presence and bearing are communicated through posture, expression, and the organisation of the surrounding space. The 1915 wartime context may inflect the portrait with a gravity appropriate to the historical moment.