Émile Verhaeren

In May 1915, when this canvas was dated, Belgium had been under German occupation since August 1914, and the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren was living in exile. The war had turned him toward grieving, patriotic verse about his invaded country. None of that enters the picture. He sits hunched over a crowded desk in a loose grey coat, pen almost on the page, with an inkwell in a dish, scattered sheets and an open book around him, shelves of books behind. The painter lettered his VR monogram and the date on one of those volumes. That same year the surgeon Pierre Delbet, the biologist Félix Le Dantec and Léonce Bénédite, curator of the Luxembourg museum in Paris, raised a public subscription and gave the portrait to that museum. In November 1916, Verhaeren fell under a moving train at Rouen station and died.