8. LÉON SPILLIAERT (1881-1946) Marine with reflection signed 'L Spilliaert' (lower left) brush and Indian ink wash, oil pastel and coloured pencil on paper Executed in 1907 54.9 x 70 cm. This work will be included in the Catalogue Raisonné currently being prepared by Dr Anne Adriaens-Pannier. Provenance Sale, Guillaume Campo, Antwerp, 24 April 1968, lot 468. Luc Schöller Collection, Antwerp. Private collection (by descent in 1976). Exhibitions Antwerp, Guillaume Campo, Léon Spilliaert, 23 October - 1 November 1965, no. 194. Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Léon Spilliaert, un esprit libre, 21 September 2006 - 3 February 2007, no. 93, (illustrated p. 92). Ostend, Maison Spilliaert, Tussen Eb en Vloed. Marines, Dijk en strand perspectieven, 9 June - 8 October 2017, no. 4. London, The Royal Academy, Léon Spilliaert, 23 February -20 September 2020, no. 64, (illustrated P. 134). Paris, Musée d'Orsay, Léon Spilliaert. Lumière et Solitude, 13 October 2020 - 10 January 2021, no. 82, (illustrated p. 115). The Hague, Kunstmuseum den Haag, Spilliaert & Braeckman, 2025, (illustrated p. 77). Bibliography A. Adriaens-Pannier, Spilliaert. Le regard de l'âme, Bruges, 2006, no. 52, (illustrated p. 43). A. Adriaens-Pannier, Léon Spilliaert. From the Depths of the Soul, Brussels, 2019, no. 52, (illustrated p. 43). In the pictorial universe of Léon Spilliaert (1881-1946), seascapes are not limited to simple coastal landscapes; they occupy a central place and play a profoundly symbolic role. Born in Ostend, a port city on the North Sea, Spilliaert had an intimate relationship with the vast expanses of the sea from childhood. Through these often empty, almost monochrome landscapes, he expresses his deepest moods. For Spilliaert, the sea is far from calm or welcoming: it is vast, silent, mysterious and sometimes disturbing. Often painted at night or in twilight, it becomes a space for existential meditation, a mental frontier between the tangible world and the invisible. Sometimes, the sea merges with the sky in an abstract fade, evoking the indistinction between dream and reality, between matter and spirit. These seascapes are much more than simple landscapes; they are reflections of the soul, visual projections of its modern malaise and windows open onto the infinite. Spilliaert's genius lies in his ability to capture emotional intensity rather than mere reality. His seascapes represent not just the sea, but the human soul, where the limited palette of blue and the masterful use of ink create visual poetry and spiritual meditation. The absence of human figures, or their reduction to solitary silhouettes, accentuates existential solitude and the immensity of space. His virtuoso technique is based on a subtle interplay between ink and pastel. The ink produces clean, fluid lines, while the pastel adds a soft, atmospheric texture. This mixture produces effects of transparency and blur, where the sea seems to dissolve into an almost unreal space. In this way, Spilliaert goes beyond the landscape to explore spiritual and emotional introspection. His virtuosity lies in his ability to make the invisible tangible, to turn the sea into an intimate place where viewers can lose themselves in contemplation. Through his choices of composition and technique, the artist succeeds in capturing an essence of the sea that goes beyond its physical reality, making it a metaphor for the depth of the human soul and the emotional force that cuts across the ages and the viewers of his work.