Fernand Khnopff

Biography

Above the entrance of the house on Avenue des Courses in Brussels was the inscription “On a que soi”: “One has but oneself.” Khnopff conceived the house in 1900 with the architect Édouard Pelseneer and moved in in 1902, and in the studio he painted standing in the middle of a golden circle set into the white mosaic floor. He rarely received guests. Those who did visit called the house a shrine and a temple of the self. It was demolished in 1938.

Khnopff was born on 12 September 1858 in Grembergen, in Flanders (by other accounts, in Dendermonde). The family was wealthy, of Austrian and Portuguese descent; the men in it traditionally became lawyers and judges. He spent his early childhood in Bruges, where his father was deputy public prosecutor, and for many years afterwards he returned to the image of that city. In the mid-1860s the family moved to Brussels. In summer he stayed with his mother’s family in the Ardennes, and Ardennes landscapes remained in his work.

His father wanted him to be a lawyer, and at eighteen Khnopff enrolled in the law faculty of the Free University of Brussels. His studies did not interest him; he read Baudelaire, Flaubert and Leconte de Lisle, and with his brother Georges he joined the circle of young writers called Jeune Belgique (“Young Belgium”), where he met Émile Verhaeren. He then began working in the studio of Xavier Mellery, and on 25 October 1876 he enrolled in the course of drawing from life at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Among his fellow students was James Ensor, whom Khnopff disliked from the start. Between 1877 and 1880 he travelled to Paris several times and saw the work of Delacroix, Ingres, Gustave Moreau and Alfred Stevens. At the World’s Fair of 1878 he became acquainted with the work of Millais and Burne-Jones. In his last year at the Academy he hardly attended classes, living in Passy and attending the open courses of Jules Joseph Lefebvre at the Académie Julian.

He first showed his work in public in 1881 at the Salon de l’Essor in Brussels. The critics were harsh; only Verhaeren praised him, and he later wrote the first monograph on the painter. In 1883 Khnopff became a founding member of Les XX, the Brussels avant-garde group, and exhibited regularly at its annual salons.

In 1885 he met the writer Joséphin Péladan, the future grand master of the Rosicrucian Order of the Rose + Cross. Péladan commissioned from him a cover for the novel “Le Vice suprême”. Khnopff devised an imaginary portrait of Leonora d’Este, but the famous soprano Rose Caron thought she recognised her own face in it and took offence. The artist destroyed the work. The newspaper scandal in Belgium and Paris, oddly enough, helped establish his name. He went on illustrating Péladan (“Femmes honnêtes”, 1888; “Le Panthée”, 1892) and on several occasions, in 1892, 1893, 1894 and 1897, was guest of honour at the Paris Salon de la Rose + Croix.

In 1889 Khnopff first went to England and often returned. His friends included Burne-Jones, Watts, Rossetti and other British artists. From 1895 he was Brussels correspondent of the art journal The Studio and until 1914 wrote a column there on Belgian and European art. In March 1898, at the first exhibition of the Vienna Secession, he showed twenty-one works, and in Vienna they were received with great admiration. To my mind, of everything he exhibited, it was the images of women that affected Klimt most strongly, such as the sphinx in “The Caress of the Sphinx”.

Khnopff’s women fall into two types: the sphinx woman and the angel woman. His most frequent model was his sister Marguerite, until her marriage in the 1890s took her away from Brussels. For some works he first made photographs: the seven tennis players in the large pastel “Memories” (1889) were drawn from many photographs of his sister. “I Lock My Door upon Myself” (1891) is in the Neue Pinakothek in Munich, and “Incense” (1898) and “Portrait of Marie Monnom” (1887) are in the Musée d’Orsay. For Bruges, to which he returned for forty years from memory and from photographs, he painted deserted, well-kept streets; “An Abandoned City” (1904) belongs to this group.

From 1903 Khnopff worked for the theatre. The sets for Georges Rodenbach’s play “Le Mirage” at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin were staged by Max Reinhardt. After designing costumes and sets for the world premiere of Ernest Chausson’s opera “Le Roi Arthus” at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, he designed more than a dozen productions there. In 1904 the council of Saint-Gilles commissioned him to decorate the ceilings of the wedding room in the new town hall. In the same year the banker Adolphe Stoclet invited him to make decorative panels for the music room of the Stoclet Palace, on which Josef Hoffmann and Klimt also worked. Later Khnopff taught at a free studio in Ixelles.

He died on 12 November 1921 in Saint-Josse-ten-Noode, near Brussels.

He is buried in Laeken Cemetery, not far from his teacher Mellery. He received the Order of Leopold twice: as Knight in 1892 and as Commander in 1919.