La tente rouge

Imbued with suggestive mystery, La tente rouge is an absorbing and poetic work that perfectly encapsulates Paul Delvaux’s unique artistic vision, creating a dream-like world at once intensely familiar and entirely surreal. Here, a coterie of women wander through a strange architectural space, appearing simultaneously connected and disengaged from one another in a series of possibly inter-related vignettes. Throughout his career, Delvaux had been fascinated by female subjects, often incorporating ethereal, somnambulist women in his paintings. As the artist explained: ‘Woman lends a very special atmosphere to a painting. Though she may be reduced to a tiny part of the scene playing her plastic role in the composition as do other elements, she draws attention to herself and becomes the centre of the composition, while being simultaneously an integral part of the architecture of the painting’ (quoted in G. Carels and C. van Deun, Paul Delvaux: His Life, p. 95).

Here, the cast of women are pictured in various states of undress and elaborate costume, each figure a subtle variation on Delvaux’s familiar female characters, slender and tall, with long flowing hair. At the centre of the composition, a pair of nude women are ensconced in the red tent of the title, the interior illuminated by the bright light emanating from an oil lamp. Their relaxed poses suggest they are unaware of the curious onlookers who peer into their private world, nor the incongruity of setting up such a tent in the middle of a grand public square. Executed in a mixture of delicate washes of watercolour, pencil, and pen and ink, Delvaux plays with the materiality of his pigments to generate a dream-like ethereality within the scene, allowing certain areas to appear transparent and almost ghostly, as if the figures are merely figments of the imagination or the memories of a moment long past.