Xavier Mellery

In the 1880s, while much of European painting was chasing bright open air and daylight, Xavier Mellery went the other way and turned to the inside of quiet houses. He drew empty stairwells, shuttered rooms and corridors at dusk, working in charcoal and a silvery wash, and gathered them under one title: "The Soul of Things." The idea was that an ordinary interior, left alone, holds a mood you can almost hear.

Mellery was a gardener's son from Laken, near Brussels, and won the Belgian Prix de Rome, which sent him to Italy to study Renaissance frescoes. He came home wanting what he called a painting of ideas, a way of loading realistic scenes with feeling, and that ambition made him one of the first stirrings of Symbolism in Belgium, the movement that valued dream and suggestion over plain description.

His quietest legacy was a pupil. A young law student named Fernand Khnopff, bored with his studies, began coming to Mellery's studio and took up painting there instead. Khnopff went on to become the leading Belgian Symbolist. Mellery also designed the row of 48 bronze figures of old Brussels trades that still line the Petit Sablon garden in the city, each craftsman holding the tool of his guild.