garden with its sixteenth-century mulberry trees, two introspective children lost in their own world of chivalry, playing sometimes quite apart, acting out their private legends. (At this point the various belfries of the town, slightly staggered and clangingly oblivious of each other, began to sound the hour.) In the far wall was the postern giving on to the outer defensive canal, a door always locked, but the source again, so Echevin proposed, for the repeated imagery of the doorway in Orst’s work – a mystic threshold, apparently, on to who knew what, as in his masterpiece ‘La Porte Entr’ouverte’.
As a young man he went to Brussels to study law, but in a first surprising show of independence gave it up after a year and managed to enrol, on the strength of some romantic designs for
Hamlet
, at the Académie des Beaux-Arts. A marked strain of Anglophilia brought him to lodge in the quartier Léopold, with the British colony – and much of the success of his earlier years was due to galleries and collectors in London and Liverpool and Glasgow. Burne-Jones was an influence, an admirer and, in his last years, when Orst would spend the two or three months of the exhibition season in England, a friend. Orst joined, in its own final years, the group of Belgian Symbolists who called themselves, like the first squad for some irregular ball-game, ‘Les XX’.
In 1898 he had made designs for
The Merchant of Venice
in Brussels and painted a life-size full-length of the Portia, Jane Byron, a Scottish actress with the abundant red hair and pale heavy-jawed beauty of the period. A scandalous love-affair followed (la Byron was suing for divorce in England, to the consternation of the Catholic Belgian press), and Orst produced a series of studies, portraits and outright fantasies over the heady six months before her death by drowning at Ostend in May 1899. The portraits and fantasies did not, it seems, finish with her death: furnished with passionate memories and several hundred photographs, Orst carried on painting her for another thirty or forty years – until he lost his sight in the mid-1930s.
In 1900 he left Brussels and returned to the abandoned city of his birth; his career as a portrait-painter was over (though he was persuaded to take the occasional commission, for instance to draw the King’s children) and henceforth he devoted himself to his melancholy obsession. I imagined him spending his days in this childhood house, in this room perhaps; but apparently he had built a house of his own on the other side of town, a tall white
maison d’artiste
topped by a figure of Hermes who gazed out with a lofty challenge over the surrounding suburban gardens. (The house had been demolished after the war to make room for an important road.)
There were three pictures of Orst himself in the booklet. The first was by a fellow-student at the Academy, a hasty charcoal drawing that emphasised potential brilliance and potential tragedy. In the second, a photograph, he was seen in his studio against a background of tapestry and
objets de vertu
, already the cold-eyed dandy I knew from the picture in Echevin’s study, half emerging, half held back by shadow. A pebbly pince-nez hung at his lapel. The third, taken in his last years, looked none the less like an experiment from the early days of photography, or like something indoors seen through a breath-clouded window, a wash of white light into which the blind old man, shawled in a wheelchair, seemed almost to dematerialise.
I was gripped by Orst’s obsession with his actress. I loved the superior way he had renounced everything in its favour, and made such a show of retreating from view into the snows of a dream. Of course I was working it up rather from the few facts given in the pamphlet: my mind ran ahead and took possession of the idea. I imagined a life consecrated to the image of Luc, a shuttered house, the icon of his extraordinary face candlelit in each room – until I
As a young man he went to Brussels to study law, but in a first surprising show of independence gave it up after a year and managed to enrol, on the strength of some romantic designs for
Hamlet
, at the Académie des Beaux-Arts. A marked strain of Anglophilia brought him to lodge in the quartier Léopold, with the British colony – and much of the success of his earlier years was due to galleries and collectors in London and Liverpool and Glasgow. Burne-Jones was an influence, an admirer and, in his last years, when Orst would spend the two or three months of the exhibition season in England, a friend. Orst joined, in its own final years, the group of Belgian Symbolists who called themselves, like the first squad for some irregular ball-game, ‘Les XX’.
In 1898 he had made designs for
The Merchant of Venice
in Brussels and painted a life-size full-length of the Portia, Jane Byron, a Scottish actress with the abundant red hair and pale heavy-jawed beauty of the period. A scandalous love-affair followed (la Byron was suing for divorce in England, to the consternation of the Catholic Belgian press), and Orst produced a series of studies, portraits and outright fantasies over the heady six months before her death by drowning at Ostend in May 1899. The portraits and fantasies did not, it seems, finish with her death: furnished with passionate memories and several hundred photographs, Orst carried on painting her for another thirty or forty years – until he lost his sight in the mid-1930s.
In 1900 he left Brussels and returned to the abandoned city of his birth; his career as a portrait-painter was over (though he was persuaded to take the occasional commission, for instance to draw the King’s children) and henceforth he devoted himself to his melancholy obsession. I imagined him spending his days in this childhood house, in this room perhaps; but apparently he had built a house of his own on the other side of town, a tall white
maison d’artiste
topped by a figure of Hermes who gazed out with a lofty challenge over the surrounding suburban gardens. (The house had been demolished after the war to make room for an important road.)
There were three pictures of Orst himself in the booklet. The first was by a fellow-student at the Academy, a hasty charcoal drawing that emphasised potential brilliance and potential tragedy. In the second, a photograph, he was seen in his studio against a background of tapestry and
objets de vertu
, already the cold-eyed dandy I knew from the picture in Echevin’s study, half emerging, half held back by shadow. A pebbly pince-nez hung at his lapel. The third, taken in his last years, looked none the less like an experiment from the early days of photography, or like something indoors seen through a breath-clouded window, a wash of white light into which the blind old man, shawled in a wheelchair, seemed almost to dematerialise.
I was gripped by Orst’s obsession with his actress. I loved the superior way he had renounced everything in its favour, and made such a show of retreating from view into the snows of a dream. Of course I was working it up rather from the few facts given in the pamphlet: my mind ran ahead and took possession of the idea. I imagined a life consecrated to the image of Luc, a shuttered house, the icon of his extraordinary face candlelit in each room – until I
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