Spilliaert’s first drawings date back to 1898; a year later he produced his oldest dated watercolour: a rather picturesque image of his father Léonard’s perfume workshop or laboratory.1
In October 1899, Spilliaert enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bruges. In the register, he cites ‘hairdresser’ as his ‘profession’. But on 17 January 1900, he had to withdraw due to illness. From then on, he was self-taught. On the subject he later wrote: ‘School, teachers, academy, anything to do with all that horrified me.’2
In 1900, Spilliaert visited the Paris World’s Fair with his father. We do not know for sure if he was able to admire much of the art on display, but his father did buy him a box of pastels as a gift. He kept the remaining stubs and box as mementos his entire life.
However, Spilliaert created his earliest works using Indian ink, pen and brush. Many depict isolated figures, dark shadows that stand out against a bright, largely empty background. The female figures are in keeping with the symbolist trend that had enthralled many artists since the 1880s, also in Belgium: conveying a great deal of mystery, passion, ambiguity, as well as the image of a woman as a dangerous being.
He was also fascinated by literature and philosophy. He drew the portrait of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche at least three times, based on a print or postcard. The evocative poetic titles Spilliaert wrote in block letters on his early works also stand out: Solitude, Misère, Paysage mort / L’attente, Le dernier regard… (Loneliness, Misery, Dead Landscape / Waiting, The Last Look etc).3 Occasionally he even added quotes from Chateaubriand or Nietzsche. Later, these were replaced by more neutral titles that do not appear on the actual work itself but are included in exhibition or sales catalogues.
Spilliaert observed both the sea and the people of Ostend, which he recreated on paper, rendering them with a touch of humour and social criticism, and some, to a certain extent, as caricatures.
One of his earliest works from this period is a commercial drawing for Brise d'Ostende, a perfume created by his father. The small-scale artwork already displays the beginnings of a motif that would regularly crop up in his oeuvre: a woman standing near the railings on the dyke in a gust of wind.
