Dating from 1968, La Fin du voyage is a potently evocative, monumental canvas executed at the height of Delvaux’s creative maturity. Writing about Delvaux, art historian Gisèle Ollinger-Zinque has noted that in his paintings, “Everything really exists, everything can be identified, everything is known to us and is accessible to them, but Delvaux, like a magician, turns upside down the established orders and hierarchies, puts together things that do not normally go together, puts opposites alongside each other, changes the course of history and plays around with t.mes and space. Using traditional everyday material and material from all periods, he created what has been termed ‘The Delvaux World’. A universe that is especially his own and which is inimitable, a universe dedicated to a single goddess: Poetry” (Exh. Cat., Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Paul Delvaux 1897-1994, Brussels, 1997, p. 16).

The present work ties together several tropes central to Delvaux’s creative vision, largely inspired by memories and recollects ions from the artist’s childhood and teenage years. One of these motifs is the passing tram, an image that features in a great number of Delvaux’s paintings. As the artist explained: “I loved trains and my nostalgia for them has stayed with me, a memory from youth. I don't attach any special significance to that, nothing to do with departure, but more an expression of a feeling. I paint the trains of my childhood and through them that childhood itself… the pictures of stations and trains do not represent reality. There remains the strange, a spectacle perhaps? I know that despite the pleasure I have in painting them, railways and stations are somewhat limiting subjects; but wrenching them out of normality has the opposite effect and pushes the subject towards the universal” (quoted in ibid., p. 27).

Likewise, the female nude is a subject that appears throughout Delvaux’s oeuvre. Similar to the trains and trams, the presence of female characters in Delvaux’s canvases is governed principally by their role in the creation of the artist’s poetic universe. In his own words, “I do not feel… the need to account for my human subjects who exist only for the purpose of the painting. These figures recount no history: they are. Further, they express nothing in themselves” (quoted in ibid., p. 22). The rendering of the female form in the present work and her posture are reminiscent of Cranach’s Venus (see fig. 1), highlighting the importance of the Old Masters within Delvaux’s practice. The connection with Venus also underlines Delvaux’s long-standing fascination with myths of antiquity, which he studied during his childhood, with symbols and architecture from antiquity re-emerging throughout the course of his artistic career (see fig. 2).

Although Delvaux's paintings are renowned for their hallucinatory imagery, the artist claimed not to be a proponent of the writings of Sigmund Freud and did not invest his compositions with the psychoanalytic references favored by the likes of Dalí and Miró. Neither did he wish to be limited by an association with a particular artistic movement. Despite this, Surrealism was instrumental in the development of Delvaux’s practice, with the artist exhibiting his works alongside several key representatives of the Surrealist movement at the Minotaure exhibition held in Brussels in 1934. Delvaux articulated how crucial his encounter with the works of Magritte and de Chirico was: “For me surrealism represented freedom to disobey the rationalist logic that to some extent at least had governed, up to then, the act of painting.... It was a major revelation to me to understand that all constraints on creativity disappeared when painting finally uncovered to my eyes its deepest and thus its most essential revelatory powers. Painting could, I realized, have a meaning of its own, it confirmed to me in a very special way its capacity to play a major emotional role” (quoted in ibid., p. 19).

In contrast with the Surrealists, Delvaux's approach to painting was more subtle in its representation of the uncanny: without being overtly grotesque or offensive with his imagery, he would interrupt the peacefulness and banality of a given scene with instances of the bizarre. Yet, despite its comparable subtlety, the influence of Surrealist artists such as de Chirico and Magritte is evident in the present work. The unnerving serenity of the composition and the use of dramatic shadowing recall de Chirico’s work, including his early canvases such as Piazza from 1913 (see fig. 3). Equally, the subversive, disorienting co-existence of night and day within the same scene evokes the work of Magritte, who dedicated a whole series of paintings to this topic (see fig. 4).

La Fin du voyage epitomizes the distinctly poetic quality of Delvaux’s oeuvre, which, according to a great admirer of his work, a celebrated French anthropologist Claude-Levi Strauss, grants the viewers an escape into a parallel world, “…truer and more desirable than that in which the daily happenings of their lives are played out” (Claude-Levi Strauss, quoted in ibid., p. 11).