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Les courtisanes d'Alexandrie signed, dated and titled 'LES COURTISANES D'ALEXANDRIE P. DELVAUX St. IDESBALD 11-10-49' (lower right) watercolour and pen and india ink on paper 29 x 431/4in. (73.6 x 109.8cm.) Executed on 11 October 1949 PROVENANCE Galerie Isy Brachot, Brussels. Acquired from the above by the present owner circa 1975. LITERATURE M. Nadeau, Les dessins de Paul Delvaux, Paris, 1967 (illustrated p. 44-45). EXHIBITION New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Surrealism: Two Private Eyes, June-Sept. 1999, no. 67 (illustrated in the catalogue p. 126-127). NOTES Charles van Deun has kindly confirmed the authenticity of the present work. Executed in 1949, Les courtisanes d'Alexandrie (The Courtesans of Alexandria) ranks among the finest of all Delvaux's watercolours. One of the most richly detailed and textured of all the artist's works on paper, Les courtisaines d'Alexandrie is also rare among these works because of its completeness, flawlessness and large size. Many of Delvaux's works on paper served as working ideas or preparatory sketches for his paintings and consequently often bear the traces of many corrections and reworkings, many others have been left unfinished. Les courtisaines d'Alexandrie is one of only a few watercolour and ink paintings that seems to be a complete realisation of an idea in itself. Depicting two smartly dressed but bare-breasted women promenading towards the viewer between a colonnade of trees and an arcade of smart 19th Century buildings which leads to the sea, the painting presents Delvaux's familiar twilight world of the wakeful sleepwalker. Though a nocturnal world, everything is revealed in sharp detail and clarity as if to emphasise that this is no sleepy or opiumated dream scene but a real pictorial mystery in the vein of the great classical paintings of the past. The strangeness of the scene is cleverly reinforced by the harsh perspective and by the dominant if also strange symmetry of the composition. While a rather electric looking moon shines down its rays in a clearly linear fashion, these lines are echoed by the bizarre array of hat pins that form a decorative collar around the necks of each of the two women. The grid-like pattern of the pavement and the repetition of the trees (strangely potted on one side and planted on the other) and the columns of the architecture also strengthen this grid-like patterning, while the women themselves also conform to the strange symmetry of the painting. Almost identical save for the colouring of their dresses and of their hair, they walk under the light, and perhaps the guidance of the moon, holding their hands in an awkward but striking pose that mirrors one another. Erotic and mysterious, this exquisitely detailed work seems, like so many of Delvaux's most successful works, to pay homage to the eternal enigma that is Woman. In this way it is a pictorial embodiment of the sentiments that the artist's friend, the poet Paul Eluard, once expressed about Delvaux's art when he wrote: "Delvaux has made of the universe the empire of a woman, always the same, who reigns over the great suburbs of the heart, where old Flemish windmills turn a pearl necklace under a crystal heart.".