Léon Spilliaert in the Print Room of the Royal Library of Belgium
| By dr. Daan van Heesch, Head of the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR)
Contact between Léon Spilliaert and the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR) dates back to 1919, when the Print Room acquired the album Sites brabançons (Brabant sites) directly from the artist. At the time, Spilliaert was still living in nearby Molenbeek-Saint-Jean. That same year, the Print Room also purchased the Plaisir d'hiver (Winter Fun and Games) series from the Brussels publisher Van Oest. In 1923, having returned to Ostend, Spilliaert sold the preparatory drawings for Sites brabançons to the Print Room, along with two other drawings and seven prints. Subsequent contact between Spilliaert and the Print Room is not documented.
The collection only truly took shape after the artist’s death. In 1956, the Royal Library of Belgium purchased the design drawings for Plaisir d'hiver from Belgian feminist Céline Dangotte (1883-1975), who had published the lithographic album in 1918. However, the main part of the collection originates from Spilliaert’s estate. Between 1957 and 1960, his widow Rachel Vergison sold 154 remaining drawings to the Print Room. These items, often smaller in size, remained unsold since they did not have great commercial appeal or were personal works never actually intended for sale. The Print Room’s Spilliaert collection thus highlights a number of lesser-known and more intimate aspects of his oeuvre.
With 188 unique works and 36 prints, the Royal Library of Belgium holds the largest public collection of Spilliaert’s art. The collection was later expanded through purchases from the art trade and at auctions, as well as through donations. A special contribution came from Georges Froidcourt (1885-1972), a magistrate from Liège, who donated eleven drawings by Spilliaert to the Print Room in 1969. The most recent acquisitions include the design drawing for Le Sculpteur de masques (The Sculptor of Masks, 1907), a work entrusted to the Print Room by the King Baudouin Foundation in 2024.
The collection was published in 2018 by Anne Adriaens-Pannier and Alain Jacobs in the collection catalogue Léon Spilliaert: De verzameling van de Koninklijke Bibliotheek van België/La collection de la Bibliothèque royale de Belgique (Pandora Publishers) and can also be consulted online at belgica.kbr.be.
