Henriette Calais 1863-1951

Henriette Calais[1] was born into a wealthy family of merchants in Vilvorde, in Flemish Brabant. She turned to painting and, in 1885, moved to Namur to study at a private academy, where she exhibited her first works at the salon of the artistic and philanthropic society Le Progrès, founded in 1881. Already exhibiting for several years, Calais enrolled at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1889 - the very year it opened its doors to women - studying drawing and painting there until 1894. During this time, she continued to exhibit widely, including at the Salon Triennal of Ghent, the Cercle des Femmes-Peintres in Brussels, and the International and Triennial Exhibition of Namur, all in 1892 alone. The mysterious titles of her works: Prière, Tourment, Sphinge, reflect her adoption of Symbolist ideas, then widely circulating in Belgium.

After participating in the Antwerp World’s Fair and the Belgian Exhibition in Geneva in 1894, she took part in 1896 in the first Salon d’Art Idéaliste organized in Brussels by painter Jean Delville, continuing the legacy of the Parisian Salons de la Rose+Croix founded a few years earlier by Joséphin Péladan. In 1899, when Calais exhibited at the Salon of Religious Art organized by Durendal, which brought together the pinnacle of Belgian Symbolism, writer and journalist Ray Nyst, a close associate of Delville, devoted a laudatory article to her in La Revue Mauve[1].. In 1904, she gained recognition at the St. Louis World’s Fair (United States), where the Belgian state acquired two of her submissions.

Having reached artistic maturity, Calais experimented with sculpture, presenting her first plaster works at the Exposition des Femmes-Artistes in Brussels in 1906 and later at the International and Universal Exhibition of Brussels in 1910. Her sculptural work centered largely on an ambitious monument project for Parc Josaphat in Schaerbeek, which remained unrealized. This project revisited the Symbolist theme of La Fontaine d’Amour, which had informed her watercolor productions in the 1890s.

The two large watercolors we present belong to the rare Symbolist corpus of Henriette Calais. The first, Âmes Solitaires(fig. 1), depicts four young women wearing the same transparent green gauze dresses, partially revealing their skin, partly obscured by strange swirls of white phylacteries. The aesthetic of the figures reveals Calais’s fascination with Italian art, oscillating between Donatellesque contrappostos and Mannerist theatricality. The execution is deliberately synthetic and rigorously compartmentalized, reminiscent of Art Nouveau posters. Similarly, the hilly, desolate landscape in the background is rendered through a subtle green watercolor gradient, reinforcing the unreal and ethereal quality of the scene. Calais conveys the distress of these solitary souls through a carefully staged composition: no gaze meets, suffering is internalized, and only the discreet trail of a tear of blood on the right cheek of the central figure breaks the overall monochrome. This powerful work was first exhibited in 1895 at the International and Triennial Fine Arts Exhibition in Namur, before being submitted to the Salon d’Art Idéaliste, where it was favorably noticed by critics and naturally compared to the works of Jean Delville, sharing “the same - rare and all the more laudable - concern for form and style[2].” The link between Âmes Solitaires and Delville’s paintings is further reinforced by the direct illustration of his 1892 poem Âmes lasses from Les Horizons hantés:

"Souls whose only dream is to embrace
the dream that was not what it had conceived,
they fall weary in a great disappointed gesture,
bruised and tired from not having reached
the distant ideals and the ecstatic earth,
- falling while cursing the womb of their mother."

The correspondence between this composition and Delville’s verses illustrates Calais’s close connection to the Belgian Idealist milieu. This large watercolor initiates an important series exploring the sentimental and amorous journeys of souls. The second watercolor (fig. 2) was likely associated with Âmes Solitaires at the first Salon d’Art Idéaliste in 1896 under a more evocative title, Vers l’Espoir. When exhibited in 1898 at the Brussels artistic and literary society under its current title, Vers la Lumière, a critic in L’Art Moderne noted that it “had previously been exhibited at the Maison d’Art.” The critic grouped the work into a “triptych” along with La Fontaine d’Amour and Âmes Solitaires, “repeating the first page of the young artist.”

Though La Fontaine d’Amour is currently unlocated, it is presumed to have been the central composition linking the two watercolors, bathing the Âmes Solitaires in the fire of emotion and directing them Vers la Lumière. Executed in a similar format and style, the second composition shows three couples expressing love within a lush natural setting. In the foreground, two of the couples, clothed in more colorful gauze, follow a clearly defined path along a stream. The central group corresponds directly to the couple on the right pedestal in the plaster model for La Fontaine d’Amour (fig. 3), while the two left-hand figures echo those in Âmes Solitaires, supporting the hypothesis of a single triptych uniting these works. Calais is known to have exhibited the set again in 1906 at the Exposition des Femmes-Artistes in Brussels, and in 1914 at the Salon Triennal, reflecting the enduring importance she attributed to these watercolors, whose unique Symbolist subject matter conveys a deeply personal emotional journey.