We do not know for certain whether Spilliaert received any art education as a child, such as from his great uncle Emile Spilliaert. However, we do know that at the age of eighteen, he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Bruges for a few months. He enrolled in October 1899. The register lists him as a hairdresser, probably a reference to his father’s profession. He took classes in the third year, where, under the guidance of Pieter Raoux, he learned to draw from ancient models, or ‘Antiek Kop’. But he was forced to withdraw on 17 January 1900, due to illness.
At the time, the Academy of Fine Arts in Bruges can be viewed simultaneously as provincial and provincialist. A number of aspiring artists from Ostend or Kortrijk, for example, might have flocked to the provincial capital, but those who wanted to pursue a professional art career completed their education at the more renowned academies of Ghent, Antwerp or Brussels, and ultimately often ended up in Paris. Although the traditional academy came under pressure in around 1900, it continued to have great appeal, including to artists of progressive, anti-academic Modernism.
Because of his brief, negligible training, Spilliaert is considered an autodidact, a self-taught artist. He predominantly learned by observing other artists: at the Ostend Museum, within Edmond Deman’s collection, and in Brussels and Paris. Fellow artists such as Constant Permeke also inspired him. Moreover, the fact that he taught himself the tricks of the trade is demonstrated by his unconventional mix of materials and techniques: he combined Indian ink, coloured pencil, watercolour, pastel and gouache on paper. In the spirit of Modernism and a sense of innovation he gave the lack of an academic education a positive spin: ‘I didn’t want any master. School, teachers, academy, anything to do with it all horrified me.’1
