The Sphinx, or, The Caresses

The Sphinx, or The Caresses, painted in 1896 and held by the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, is Khnopff's most explicitly mythological Symbolist work and one of the defining images of European fin-de-siècle art. It depicts a cheetah-headed sphinx caressing a young androgynous man with feline tenderness — a scene of beauty that carries within it an implicit threat of destruction. The sphinx was one of the central symbols of Symbolist culture: a creature of inscrutable mystery, combining intellect and carnality, femininity and danger, the beautiful and the lethal. Khnopff's choice of a cheetah body — rather than the traditional leonine form — draws on the association of the big cat with sensuality and predation. The figure being caressed shows Khnopff's characteristic androgynous male ideal, simultaneously the artist himself (the facial features resemble his own self-portraits) and an everyman confronting the unknowable feminine.

Oil on canvas executed with extraordinary technical refinement. Khnopff renders the cheetah's spotted coat with the same precision as the human figure's skin, creating an unsettling visual equivalence between animal and human beauty.