Translation: Jon Alkorta Martiartu, PhD (UPV/EHU)
Jean Delville: Art and Occultism
Jean Delville is one of the leading artists associated with the Symbolist movement of the late 19th century. Born in 1867 in Louvain, he excelled in drawing and painting from an early age. Due to his artistic and philosophical concerns, he was greatly influenced by the occult currents that flourished on the European continent during the second half of the 19th century. He was one of the youngest painters of the Symbolist movement, which meant that in his maturity, owing to his search for the ideal in art and thought, his pictorial and literary work was overshadowed by the avant-garde movements. He lived to the age of eighty-eight without ceasing in his activities as a painter, essayist and occultist. We shall focus on his youth, when his occult connections were forged through the influence of such figures as Joséphin Péladan, Edouard Schouré, Richard Wagner and H. P. Blavatsky.
Initial influences
We could say that Jean Delville was a child prodigy. He excelled in the art of drawing from a very early age and at the age of twenty he took part for the first time in an exhibition through an artistic society called L’Essor. These early works were linked to social realism, a movement that denounced the hardships of the working class. In this context, Delville discovered one of his first important influences: the poetic and literary work of Charles Baudelaire. He produced a frontispiece for Baudelaire’s works and a work inspired by Les Épaves, a collection of poems by his compatriot Félicien Rops.
The painter discovered that his true vocation was the search for the ideal through thought and art. For this reason he soon found some elements to give vent to his idealism through occultist currents. In this sense, a second influence on Delville was the work of Richard Wagner, one of the icons admired by the symbolist movement. First Tristan and Isolde and, above all, Parsifal influenced his convictions. But the way in which Delville gained access to Wagner’s thought was through Le drame musicale, a text by the occultist Edouard Schuré, the first esoteric reference in the work of our artist. Schuré gave a singular interpretation of Parsifal, as if the work contained within it a process of initiation. The three parts of the opera correspond to the preparation, the trial and the illumination. Such was the impact on Delville that he dedicated two canvases and a drawing to the character of Parsifal. Schuré’s influence on the painter continued with the occultist’s masterpiece, The Great Initiates, which is still published today and was one of Delville’s bedside books.
The influence of Joséphin Péladan’s androgynous
Jean Delville was in Paris in 1887, where he met another great occultist: Joséphin Péladan. He considered himself a descendant of the magicians of ancient Assyria and proclaimed himself sâr, a title used by the royalty of that country. Péladan founded the Order of the Rosicrucian Cross of the Temple and the Grail, and devoted himself to writing essays and artistic criticism from an esoteric perspective. In fact, his thought had a strong aesthetic component, which is perhaps why Delville was attracted to his ideas. Péladan organised a series of annual exhibitions in Paris called the Salons de la Rose Croix, which ran from 1892 to 1897. Our artist took part between 1892 and 1895. One of Péladan’s essays, The Androgynous, had a direct influence on Delville’s conception of the ideal he was seeking. At this point we should refer to two of the painter’s canvases whose main theme is androgyny. They are The School of Plato and The Love of Souls.
The first of these canvases was painted by Delville in 1895 while he enjoyed the Prix de Rome from the Belgian academy. It seems reasonable to think that he wanted to respond to this scholarship with a painting of large proportions and tried to evoke a classical theme. This painting would reflect the ideology he had cultivated, which he himself called ‘idealist aesthetics’.
In The School of Plato, Delville drew a symmetrical scheme with a bearded, robed Plato at the centre of the composition with six naked, androgynous disciples on either side. It is thus a parallel between Plato and his pupils and Christ and his disciples at the Last Supper. Here we have that Neoplatonic Renaissance idea of Plato’s elevation to divine status, as if he were Jesus Christ himself. In addition to Péladan’s Neoplatonic influence, we have again the influence of Édouard Schuré’s postulates, which established that both Christ and Plato had been two of the great initiates of human history.
But let us return to the theme of androgyny. Delville sought to capture on canvas a spiritual beauty that is sublimated through the depiction of sexually ambiguous characters representing perfection, archetype and symbol of the ideal. The journey of Delville’s canvas is a journey back to the origins: from Péladan to the Renaissance; from the Renaissance to Plato, whose ideas about androgyny in The Symposium are echoed by the painter. However, the idea of the androgynous in The Symposium, with its double entities prior to the fall, was also transferred to painting by Delville in an exercise of merging the male and female bodies into a whole. This is expressed in the canvas The Love of Souls of 1900.
The alchemical tradition had represented the androgynous being, the Rebis, as the union of two halves (one female and one male) with two heads, male and female. Delville may well have been familiar with these drawings, found in esoteric treatises such as the Aurora consurgens, which were popular in the occult circles he frequented. Delville would sublimate the image of this androgynous archetype of the union of the sexes in a canvas with two naked bodies of woman and man, one behind the other and with their arms open in perfect union, the archetype of Platonic love. But there is one more element to bear in mind: the arrangement of the two souls in the form of a cross takes us back to the iconography of Christ.
This composition is not arbitrary, as it was not in The School of Plato, and we must consider Delville’s intention in arranging the two bodies in this way. It may be a double symbolism: first, that the deep and true love between man and woman leads to the fusion of their souls, so that they come to identify with Christ (the idea of the reunion of the sexes in the figure of the Saviour); second, the reunification of both sexes in the very figure of God, in accordance with the Renaissance esoteric tradition and its controversial revision by the occultists whom Delville followed (essentially Péladan).
Spiritism
A fashionable practice in fin-de-siècle Europe was spiritualism. Given Jean Delville’s occultist affiliation, it is not surprising that he was fascinated by mediumistic sessions. We have evidence of this in one of his most enigmatic paintings. The title is unclear; we know it as Portrait of Mrs. Stuart Merrill, but it is not clear who the woman portrayed in the painting is. The clue to her identity comes from Olivier Delville, the author’s son, whose biography states that the poet Stuart Merrill had a house in Forest, Belgium (where Jean Delville lived), and that his wife was admired by the artist, both for her beauty and as a medium.
The portrait paints a disturbing picture. It is of a young entranced woman; probably a medium, as her eyes are blank. Her red hair seems to dissolve into a halo that could be her astral body. There is another disturbing element: the young woman holds a book in her hands, the title of which we cannot see, but which has a triangle drawn on the cover. If we consider the iconography used by Delville, it could well be a symbol of the knowledge acquired through magic, the Kabbalah or hermeticism. The canvas has been considered one of the quintessential occult works of the late 19th century.
The Idol of Perversity
The last work we will refer to is a charcoal entitled The Idol of Perversity. It depicts a nude, crowned female figure seen from a low angle, which heightens the sense of power of this idol. Uncoiling from her neck, a serpent descends around her breasts. All the authors who refer to the work, including Bram Dijkstra, allude to this figure as representing the femme fatale. Other painters, such as Franz von Stuck, depict the icon of the woman and the serpent as a sign of fatality. Thus, we find representations of Eve, Lilith, Cleopatra, Salambo, Harmonia, etc., all women considered to be archetypes of female evil at the time. But beyond this undeniable fatality in Delville’s work there is an orientalist connotation in the idol. This crowned woman could well represent a Mesopotamian deity, such as Ishtar or Astarte, very common in the fin-de-siècle symbolism. Our painter may well have found them in theosophical readings, such as Isis Unveiled or The Secret Doctrine (both by Helena Blavatsky), which were very much in vogue at the time and from which the artist would draw to generate his own thought.
Delville’s art and written works have yet to be fully explored. The efforts of his granddaughter (Miriam Delville), art exhibitions such as the monographic exhibition held in 2014 at the Rops Museum in Namur (Belgium), or texts such as L’esoterisme et le symbolisme belge by Sébastien Clerbois, are beginning to delve into the influence of the occult element in fin-de-siècle painting, of which Jean Delville is one of the great representatives. The present article is a tribute to this magnificent artist and thinker, as well as to the study of the relationship between art and occultism.
If you want to know more
Jean Delville: Art between Nature and the Absolute. This book is the first full-length study of the art and writings of Jean Delville.
Jean Delville (1867-1953), maître de l’idéal.
OpenEdition le sugiere que cite este post de la siguiente manera:
Dr. Pedro Ortega (3 de julio de 2023). Jean Delville: Arte y Ocultismo. El blog de Tartalo. Recuperado 19 de marzo de 2025 de https://doi.org/10.58079/unvr