A reading by Emile Verhaeren

This large canvas records a real gathering around 1903, in the poet Émile Verhaeren's apartment near Paris, at Saint-Cloud. Verhaeren, a Belgian writer at the centre of French Symbolist circles, stands reading his verse aloud while friends listen around a crowded table. They are not invented types but named men van Rysselberghe knew, among them the writers André Gide and Maurice Maeterlinck and the critic Félix Fénéon. Van Rysselberghe built the picture from thousands of small dots of colour, the pointillist method he had taken from the painter Georges Seurat, though here the touch is looser and warmer. It hangs now in Ghent, the Belgian city where van Rysselberghe himself had been born.