Paul Delvaux. Portrait of a little girl sitting in an armchair. Graphite on paper. Signed and dated 25 June 1954. Authenticity confirmed by the Delvaux Foundation. Rare and high quality work. VERY GOOD CONDITION. Framed with a protective glass: 48 X 58 cm This work can be consulted by appointment at our office in BXL. Provenance: private collection in Brussels. Paul Delvaux was born in 1897 in Antheit (Belgium), near Huy in the house of his maternal grandparents. His father Jean was a lawyer at the Brussels Court of Appeal. Paul is under the influence of his mother and is raised in fear of the female world. His bourgeois family environment remained reticent about the young Paul's taste for painting, but he accepted the path of architecture at the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts (1916-1917). However, Delvaux's vocation lay elsewhere... After his studies, he produced post-impressionist and then expressionist paintings influenced, in particular, by James Ensor. However, with each change of inspiration, Paul Delvaux destroyed his paintings (1920-24). Paul never liked labels and classifications. For him, each artist is unique, irreducible to a system, a school, an ism. It was when he discovered a painting by Giorgio De Chirico, "Melancholy and Mystery of a Street", during the surrealist exhibition "Minotaure" at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (1934) that Delvaux had the "revelation" of surrealism. Magritte, Ernst, Dali and above all de Chirico made him aware of a new universe in which rationality, conventions and prohibitions were, if not abolished, at least diverted by the paths of poetry, the imagination and the symbol, and through which Delvaux found both an outlet for his anxiety and a faithful mirror of his inner discourse. Influenced by Magritte, by Dali, by Ingres, his personality nevertheless asserts itself as authentic and new, crossed by recurring themes and elements. Without ever joining the movement, he began, with "Femmes en dentelle", a series of works of such profound unity that any of his paintings could be recognized at first glance. He exhibited his work at the Surrealist exhibition in Paris in 1938. His very characteristic painting is made of frozen landscapes painted in a hyper-realistic way where naked women evolve, young ephebes frozen in a particular environment: a garden, a deserted station, ruins, in the streets. His subjects are often accompanied by a disturbing atmosphere. Beautiful women projected in rough industrial universes where trains going nowhere are mixed with glances in the distance and eyes immensely wide and open on the unknown. Skeletons sometimes haunt his paintings. Another favourite world of Paul Delvaux is the railway ("Trains du soir"). He was even appointed station master in Louvain-la-Neuve. He also painted large murals such as the Casino-Kursal in Ostend, the Palais des Congrès in Brussels and the Institut de Zoologie in Liège. Paul Delvaux received a noble favour from the King of the Belgians but he did not follow it up. The village of Saint-Idesbald in the Flemish municipality of Coxyde, on the Belgian coast, where he lived for a long time since 1945, has dedicated a museum to him since 1982, where a series of paintings characteristic of his artistic development can be admired. Paul Delvaux died on 20 July 1994 in Veurne, where he had moved in 1969. He is buried in the town's cemetery. "I would like to paint a fabulous picture in which I would live, in which I could live. Paul Delvaux.