Nuit de Noël

A serene and reverie-like depiction of a young woman at an urban train station, Nuit de Noël was painted by Paul Delvaux in 1956, while the artist was a professor of large-scale painting at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art et d’Architecture in Brussels. Spanning nearly two metres in width, the present composition reflects Delvaux’s adroit ability to create monumental and compelling visions of dreamlike worlds. Translating to ‘Christmas Night,’ Nuit de Noël is a nocturnal scene cast in cinematic technicolour by the glow of a full moon. On the far side of the train tracks, a Neoclassical station house rises up against the cloudless sky, its glass awning matching the roof of the nearside platform, where a blonde woman in a ruby red overcoat stands beside a row of potted bay trees. Facing into the composition, this solitary figure is also a parallel, or extension of the viewer, who likewise looks out upon this metropolitan panorama. Ahead of the woman, and perhaps the objects of her gaze, the platform leads to a shadowy doorway, where the faintest trace of a spectral figure can be glimpsed, and the last freight car of a steam train rolls through the station, the engine’s puffs of steam billowing in the distance, dissolving into the crisp night air.
Enamoured by rail travel as a boy, Delvaux had once imagined he would grow up to become a stationmaster. While he did not pursue the profession as an adult, his early admiration remained, and railway lines, trains and train stations recur throughout his oeuvre. For Delvaux, the depictions of trains in his art served as a poignant homage to his boyhood, and in conversation with Jacques Meuris he explained, ‘I paint the trains of my childhood, and consequently, that childhood itself’ (quoted in M. Rombaut, Delvaux, Barcelona, 1990, p. 22). Indeed, in Nuit de Noël the train is more reflective of those of the early Twentieth Century, than of the increasingly modern locomotives that were replacing steam trains at the time the artist composed the present work. In addition to these nostalgic childhood recollections, Delvaux drew inspiration from the steam trains that run along the horizon of many of Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings. Awed by the enigmatic, lyrical essences that radiated from De Chirico’s work, Delvaux hailed him the ‘poet of emptiness... because he suggested that poem of silence and absence’ (quoted in ibid., p. 14).
In Nuit de Noël, the urban setting is, to a certain extent, realistic and familiar, and yet there is something dreamlike and unnatural about the moonlit scene. This sense of the magical and mysterious is, in part, created by Delvaux’s style of depicting light, which Barbara Emerson commented was executed ‘as if he were manipulating theatrical equipment of spots and dimmers’ (Delvaux, Antwerp, 1985, p. 174). In the present work, the interplay of light and darkness enhances the otherworldliness of the composition, as the shadows cast in the bright moonlight distort the forms of the objects which create them. The splayed shadows of the fence posts stretch across the silvery cobbles, almost to the top of the freight car’s shadow, and the round stone balls on the platform morph from spheres to ellipses – their real forms transformed in the shadows. Yet it is not only natural light that possesses this metamorphic power in Nuit de Noël, and, caught in the crisply defined beams of the electric overhead station lamps, the bay trees cast miniature shadow versions of themselves.
The present work, with its vibrant jewel-toned palette and lucid clarity, seems to exist in a moment that sits outside night and day, and the tensions between these realms of dreams and reality lie at the very heart of the Surrealist ethos. Delvaux’s Surrealist compatriot, René Magritte, also explored the unification of night and day, most famously with his L’ Empire des lumières series, which he began in 1949. Magritte saw a ‘poetry’ in his simultaneous evocations of day and night, where a bright, midday sky hangs above a shadowy nocturnal landscape. In Nuit de Noël, Delvaux did not juxtapose the notions of night and day as Magritte did, but elided them, evoking a dreamworld where nighttime is day bright. The effect is similarly poetic, and it is this lyrical potential of the present work in particular that literary scholars Christine Genin and Jacques La Mothe cite as influencing the novels of Claude Simon, and the poetry and fictional works of Michel Butor respectively.
In the mid to late 1950s Delvaux painted two other depictions of young women at train stations – Solitude in 1955 (Houbart-Wilkin, no. 222; National Collection of Belgium) and Train du Soir in 1957 (Houbart-Wilkin, no. 231; Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels), and from 1960 onwards these themes were increasingly threaded through his works. Nuit de Noël perhaps even forms a pair with Solitude, for both are pictorially and compositionally very similar; both unveil cloudless nights with a full moon, blonde girls in red dresses or coats, Neoclassical station houses, and wooden green freight cars, and all these elements are arranged in analogous positions. The larger of the two is Nuit de Noël, and Régine Rémon commented that it faithfully replicates its antecedent, Solitude, but crucially does so in a more important format. Rémon draws particular notice to the open doorway at the end of the righthand platform in the present work, a beckoning portal heralded by the promenade of trees. It is here that the delicate outline of a figure seems to stand, perhaps inviting the viewer onwards, deeper into this ethereal world. Unseen in public for over fifty years, Nuit de Noël was last exhibited in the artist’s 1969 retrospective in Paris.