In September 1935, Spilliaert left Ostend to settle permanently in Brussels. The piano lessons that his daughter Madeleine was taking at the conservatory was the decisive reason for this move. In Brussels, he discovered Wolvendael Park, the Bois de la Cambre and the Sonian Forest, but this move did not bring about a real caesura in his art. Not soon after, a great honour was bestowed on him: in 1936, Spilliaert had a solo exhibition at the prestigious Palais des Beaux-Arts.
From 1937, Léon and Rachel visited the country house of lawyer Adolphe Van Glabbeke, a friend since 1930, and later minister and mayor of Ostend. Spilliaert enjoyed the vast, unspoiled nature and trees in particular became the motif of choice in his later works.
Brothers Luc and Paul Haeserts involved Spilliaert in their new Brussels-based art group Les Compagnons de l’Art. In August 1937, his daughter Madeleine married Tony van Rossum, and on 13 September 1939, Spilliaert’s first grandchild, Irmingarde van Rossum, was born.
The family continued to move house even during the war. In May 1940, Ostend was the target of a German bombing raid. The area around Kapellestraat was badly hit. Not only Spilliaert’s childhood home, but also the town hall where his work hung alongside that of Ensor, Khnopff and others, was destroyed.
Despite his poor health and the war, Spilliaert continued to create new works after he turned sixty. Pierre Vandervoort congratulated him from Ostend, a sinister city on a sinister coast, according to his architect friend.1 Spilliaert had previously written: ‘After the war, everything will be splendidly restored in between two waves.’2 Meanwhile, the artist was avidly reading the diaries of Eugène Delacroix.
During the last ten years of his life, the motif of trees dominated Spilliaert’s work. In some cases, they are repetitive trunks like an enigmatic forest scene, in others, branches stand out against the sky like calligraphic lines, framed and detached from their trunks and roots.
Spilliaert also developed a new pen technique. With remarkable patience he produced hatching and geometric shapes on his sheet with hundreds of fine, short pen strokes. Landscapes, such as Wolvendael Park, continued to fascinate him. From 1944, he worked almost exclusively with this technique, both for his trees and for a number of Ostend scenes. For the background, he used a light watercolour.3 In May 1944, toward the end of the war, he was able to exhibit many of the tree compositions at the Centre for Fine Arts.
Spilliaert suffered during the last ten years of his life from the heart disease to which he succumbed in 1946. A day before his death, on 22 November, Spilliaert wanted to return to Ostend. He did not manage it while he was still alive. He died on 23 November, and following a Mass in Ixelles, was buried in Ostend on 27 November 1946.
