Fernand Khnopff

Fernand Khnopff (born September 12, 1858, Grembergen, near Termonde, Belgium—died November 12, 1921, Brussels) was a Belgian painter, draftsman, photographer, sculptor, and writer associated with Symbolism and known best for his paintings that blend precise realism with an ethereal dreamlike atmosphere.

Khnopff came from an affluent family and was one of three siblings. When he was a child, his family lived for a time in the medieval Belgian city of Brugge, a place that would appear in many of his works later in life. Otherwise he was raised in Brussels and spent summers in the country in Fosset, Belgium, another place that he would later paint. In 1875 he set out to study law at the Free University of Brussels, but within a year he left to study art and literature at that city’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts. There he studied painting with Xavier Mellery. Throughout his years at the academy, Khnopff spent his summers in Paris to broaden his studies in the arts, and at the 1878 Exposition Universelle (world’s fair) he discovered works by Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones and by Symbolist Gustave Moreau, artists who would have a major impact on the direction of his painting career. He began exhibiting (mostly landscapes) in 1881 with the Belgian exhibition society called L’Essor, and by 1882 he was showing his own Symbolist works, many of which had subjects that were inspired by literature, especially by the writings of Gustave Flaubert. He soon found the support of poet Émile Verhaeren, who went on to connect Khnopff to the writers and poets of La Jeune Belgique, Brussels’s avant-garde literary review that led to a movement of the same name.

In 1883 Khnopff became a founding member of the Belgian avant-garde artists’ group Les Vingt, which at its founding included 19 other artists, James Ensor among them. Khnopff created notable works such as Listening to Schumann (1883), After Joséphin Péladan: The Supreme Vice (c. 1884), and In Fosset. An Evening (1886). After Joséphin Péladan: The Supreme Vice served as the frontispiece to French writer and Symbolist Joséphin Péladan’s popular erotic novel Le Vice suprême (1884).

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By the time Les Vingt dissolved in 1893, Khnopff’s career had taken off. While holding a firm position within the avant-garde circles of Brussels, he also became known as a portraitist of the city’s elite. His best-known portraits from that period include Portrait of Jeanne Kéfer (1885), Portrait of Marie Monnom (1887), Portrait of Jeanne de Bauer (1890), Portrait of the Children of Louis Nève (1893), and two portraits of his sister, Marguerite (1887 and 1896). Khnopff used his sister as a model repeatedly, often working from his photographs of her. Two works from 1891—Who Shall Deliver Me? (Christina Georgina Rossetti) and I Lock My Door upon Myself—point to Khnopff’s interest in poetry, in this case that of British poet Christina Rossetti. In 1896 he painted The Caresses (The Sphinx), his best-known work. The painting’s subject is an interpretation of Moreau’s Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864) and features a hybrid human-leopard nestled next to an androgynous Oedipus.

Between 1900 and 1902 Khnopff designed a lavish house and studio for himself at 41 rue des Courses in Brussels (demolished 1936). During the decade beginning in 1903, he collaborated regularly with Brussels opera house Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, designing costumes, scenery, and sets for many productions. He also decorated interiors for landmark buildings in Brussels: Stoclet House and the Hôtel de Ville, Saint-Gilles. In his paintings, drawings, photographs, and sculptures of the 1900s, he continued to focus on mythological subjects and themes of introspection, memory, temptation, and mystery. Reflecting an ongoing interest in dreams and sleep, he turned to the Greek god of sleep Hypnos numerous times as a subject in his paintings and sculptures. Through the early 1910s he exhibited widely throughout Europe to great acclaim. Khnopff stayed in Brussels during World War I (1914–18), and, though his health and eyesight were declining, he taught painting classes, wrote on art and artists, and continued to create his own works.