Sketch for the Moment Set Ablaze

Van Rysselberghe painted this sketch for 'The Moment Set Ablaze' (La Lecture by Emile Verhaeren) in 1897, the year he was working on what would become one of his most celebrated paintings — a large canvas showing a group of literary and artistic figures listening to the poet Verhaeren read his work. The sketch records his thinking about the composition before committing to the final, ambitious work. Paintings of literary readings were a significant genre in late nineteenth-century Belgian and French culture, offering an opportunity to depict the social milieu of the avant-garde while celebrating the art of poetry and the primacy of the spoken word. The figures in both sketch and final painting included identifiable members of the Brussels and Paris intellectual circle — writers, painters, critics — whose assembly in one room would constitute a kind of group portrait of a cultural moment.

As a compositional sketch, this canvas shows Van Rysselberghe working out the spatial arrangement of the figure group before applying full divisionist technique. The treatment is likely looser and more exploratory than the finished work, with compositional problems — how to arrange a large group of seated and standing figures within a coherent pictorial space — taking priority over optical analysis.