Paul Delvaux (1897-1994)

The sight and sounds of tram-cars plying the streets of Brussels were among Delvaux’s fondest early memories. “As a child,” he reminisced to Jacques Meuris, “I liked trains and this nostalgia has stayed with me... I paint the trains of my childhood, and consequently, that childhood itself” (quoted in M. Rombaut, Delvaux, Barcelona, 1990, p. 22). As a boy he dreamed of becoming a station-master; among his favorite early subjects as an aspiring painter were the railway lines that traversed the Gare du Quartier Léopold in Brussels, before the construction of a modern station, today the Gare de Bruxelles-Luxembourg. “I remember the Station of the Léopold Quarter when I was 4-5 years old,” Delvaux said, “seeing the waiting rooms of the second and third class, and through the windows I could see the old cars of the times, the old cars that were in use around 1903, the old copper cars” (quoted in Z. Barthelman and J. van Deun, Paul Delvaux: Odyssey of a Dream, Saint-Idesbal, Belgium, 2007, p. 16).
Delvaux also drew inspiration from those half-hidden trains that skirt the horizon in paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, his favorite modern painter, whom he called the “poet of emptiness...because he suggested that poem of silence and absence” (quoted in M. Rombaut, op. cit., 1990, p. 14). The locomotives and carriages Delvaux preferred to depict, as seen in de Chirico and here, are not the modern electric kind, but those dating from the turn of the century or even earlier. “The old steam machines had something human, when they started with their power,” he explained. “I believe that the steam machine fits a painting much better. I believe it has a certain ‘oldness’ and this ‘oldness’ has become customary in my work” (quoted in Z. Barthelman and J. van Deun, op. cit., 2007, p. 45).
To recreate these scenes required special attention to minute realistic detail, which gave Delvaux special pleasure in painting them; at the same time he imbued his locomotives and railway cars with that magical appearance of existing in the peculiar light of memory and nostalgia. To foster this effect, Delvaux favored nocturnal settings, in which the moon represents the inner eye of memory and dream. Indeed, these scenes signify deeper tensions. “Trams, trains and train stations work as recurring figures that represent the tangible and visible sides of reality,” Rombaut has observed. “These same elements stand out on the canvas as signs of repressed desire, forbidden games and stored up dreams that his undeciphered memory has delivered into his hands” (op. cit., 1990, p. 22).