Strange, sinister and very Belgian: Léon Spilliaert at the Royal Academy reviewed

The strange and faintly sinister works of the Belgian artist Léon Spilliaert have been compared — not unreasonably — to those of many writers, Edgar Allan Poe among them. But as I walked round the Spilliaert exhibition at the Royal Academy, it was not any of these that came to my mind. It was the Father Brown detective stories by G.K. Chesterton.

I wasn’t thinking of the neatly paradoxical plots, but rather of Chesterton’s mastery of atmosphere. Consider The Absence of Mr Glass (1914), which takes place in a ‘desolate’ seaside resort. As Father Brown investigates, ‘…the afternoon was closing with a premature and partly lurid twilight; the sea was of an inky purple and murmuring ominously’.

This could be a description of a Spilliaert, the master — as it turns out — of haunted Edwardian seascapes. He spent his most productive years in Ostend, a sort of Belgian Brighton with royal connections and a cheery, seedy atmosphere.