Can you call someone a painter if he ‘only’ produced sixty paintings? Spilliaert was an artist who worked primarily on paper, using techniques that allowed him to work quickly such as Indian ink, watercolour, coloured pencil and pastels. He combined them to create more than 4,500 works on paper, without any oil paint, including just about all of his most important and well-known masterpieces. Yet the epitaph on his tomb reads: Kunstschilder. Léon Spilliaert (Painter).

When you see Spilliaert’s sombre works and intense, psychological self-portraits you’re not likely to assume the creator is a bundle of laughs. In his twenties, his melancholy seemed all-consuming. Nevertheless, a sense of humour can be glimpsed in several of his works, from the caricatures of Ostend locals and singing mussels to a portrait of Constant Permeke, who was not amused in the least - he stomped it to pieces with his clogs. In fact, Spilliaert was actually a good storyteller and could be quite cheery at times.

Spilliaert never had a proper teacher - and never wanted one, as he himself explicitly stated. In around 1900, he spent just three months at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bruges. Yet, as an autodidact, he was still an apprentice: his masters were simply unaware of the role they played. Spilliaert was inspired by other artists, by the work of Odilon Redon at his first employer in Brussels, by Ensor in Ostend and by the works of his friend Permeke.

Although he lived with his parents at 2 Kapellestraat in the town centre until he was 35, Spilliaert moved home no fewer than ten times from March 1917. In Ostend he moved from house to house and from one apartment to another, but also sought alternative, more suitable places in Brussels, more specifically in Molenbeek and Ixelles. Practical matters were usually behind the moves: sometimes a ceiling fell down, other houses were too gloomy or too far away from where his daughter had piano lessons. Interestingly, the Spilliaert family preferred to move home in the spring, specifically in the month of May.

Spilliaert rarely had a proper studio. In late 1908, early 1909, he briefly rented a studio on Visserskaai, but for most of his life Spilliaert worked in his living space. Just look at all the flower pots, mirrors and furniture in the background of his self-portraits. As an artist who worked primarily on paper, he didn’t need much: he often worked at the dining room table and attached his paper to a sturdy board with four spikes. He did this in an organised and almost ritualistic manner, always neatly dressed in a shirt and three-piece suit, with everything in its proper place. Quite handy, don’t you think, not having to work with messy oil paints and turpentine?