Je ferme ma porte sur moi-même

The title comes from a poem by the English writer Christina Rossetti, called 'Who Shall Deliver Me?', with its line about locking the door upon oneself. Fernand Khnopff painted this in 1891, when Symbolist artists across Europe had stopped describing the world outside and begun picturing states of mind: longing, dread, withdrawal. A woman sits at a table and looks past us, awake but somewhere else. On a shelf behind her rests a bust of Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, and three cut lilies wilt in the foreground. Khnopff admired the English Pre-Raphaelites and borrowed their auburn-haired, faraway women, but drained the story out of them. Nothing here is happening. He worked in Brussels and often modelled these dreaming faces on his own sister, Marguerite.