Born in Brussels in 1904, Suzanne Fabry was the daughter of the Belgian symbolist painter Émile Fabry (1865–1966) and his wife Virginie Duchênes. Her brother, Barthélémy, was born in 1898. Three years before Suzanne’s birth, her father was named Professor of Drawing at the l’Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, where he had been a student in the 1880s, and her childhood was spent in his house-studio at rue Verte (today rue du Collège Saint-Michel, n°6) in Woluwe-Saint-Pierre, a south-eastern neighborhood of Brussels.

At the start of World War I, Suzanne moved with her family to England where they remained until the end of the war, first in Herefordshire and later in the Cornish town of Saint-Ives. They returned to their home in Belgium after the war and in 1923 Suzanne enrolled as a student at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts where she studied under Jean Delville (1867-1953) and Constant Montald (1862-1944), two of the founders, alongside her father, of a group of artists who called themselves “L'art monumental.” The group’s aim was to produce public, monumental, and culturally sophisticated art that would elevate the public consciousness through the representation of idealized universal themes. Their commanding nudes would constitute an important source of inspiration for Suzanne’s own work.

Suzanne graduated from the Académie in 1928 and embarked on her career as a painter in the 1930s, taking part in the triennial Salon in Antwerp (1930) and the quadrennial Salon in Liège (1931). Around the same t.mes , her father was completing a cycle of large-scale paintings for the entrance and staircase of Brussels’ opera house, La Monnaie, where, many years later, Suzanne and her husband Edmond Delescluze (1905-1993) would be employed as cost.mes and set designer respectively, a collaboration that began in 1948 and is recorded in over 900 sketches and stage maquettes preserved today in the archives of La Monnaie. She continued to pursue her career as a painter, alongside her work as head of the opera’s cost.mes workshop, until her death in 1985.

In this monumental multi-figure composition, painted in 1943, Fabry adapted the solidity, scale, and style favored by the Symbolist painters of her father’s generation to a defiantly modern feminine subject. Fabry perfected her own brand of pointillism, establishing the pale blue background in broad loosely layered brushstrokes against which the four figures are sharply defined in saturated ochre tones. The palette and composition–statuesque theatrically posed figures arranged across a picture plane–ehcoing her father’s work, notably Maternity (1923) and Towards the Unknown, for which Suzanne posed and was photographed as aide memoires (see Jacqueline Guisset, Emile Fabry, 2000).

These photographs, and the studio practice they elucidate, suggest the context in which Suzanne developed her own working methods and artistic style. Suzanne’s four figures are arguably full-length self-portraits–with idealized features resembling the artist’s own, looking to her self-portrait with paintbrush in hand (1932) –making the composition a triumphant declaration of her artistic identity as both creator and muse.

The central figure’s pose recalls Botticelli’s iconic Birth of Venus, recasting the Renaissance goddess in a personal and fiercely modern mode. Rather than covering herself, Fabry’s figure reaches up to her auburn hair, staring straight at the viewer and seemingly strides forward, trading Botticelli’s stationary feigned modesty for confidence in motion. Impastoed splashes of water at her feet evoke Venus’s outsized shell in a more realistic and yet abstract reference perhaps to her own rebirth as an artist.

Fabry returned to the female nude the following year in a large-scale single-figure representation of a woman–perhaps herself–called L’Attente (1944), exhibited at the Salon de printemps that year. Holding an amphora above her head with two hands against a distant background of ancient ruins, the figure stands tall, matching the height of the doric column behind her, as a pillar of strength and fortitude, peering fearlessly ahead, her weight shifted to the front of her toes as if to leap forward.

Female Nudes by the Sea is an important rediscovery within the oeuvre of Suzanne Fabry, and the 20th-century Symbolist movement. In this multi-figure self-portrait, Fabry audaciously contends with her artistic heritage and asserts her own distinctive identity and aesthetic.