Fernand Khnopff

Look through Fernand Khnopff's paintings and the same face keeps returning, pale, cool and unreadable, always his younger sister Marguerite. She was his favourite model, and he often worked from photographs he took of her rather than from life, posing her in different clothes until the image was exactly what he wanted.

Khnopff came up in Brussels in the 1880s as a founding member of Les Vingt, the avant-garde circle of twenty artists who invited the newest painters of Europe to show in the city. He made his name as a portraitist of the Brussels elite, then turned inward toward Symbolism, drawing on the Pre-Raphaelites he admired in England and on the poetry of Christina Rossetti. His best-known canvas, from 1891, borrows its title from her: 'I Lock My Door Upon Myself.'

That title was close to a creed. Khnopff was a private, self-enclosed man who reached a kind of cult status in his own lifetime, and late in life he built himself a house in Brussels that worked almost as a temple to his own art, austere and carefully arranged. His childhood years in Bruges, the quiet medieval city where his father had been posted, kept surfacing in his work for the rest of his life.