House and Garden 
THE HOUSE 
pictures. The same hand which chooses and dis¬ 
cards the lines and colors of a picture has directed 
also the furnishing of the studio. 
But no one has set his dwelling so perfectly in har¬ 
mony with his paintings as the most refined symbol¬ 
ist of our time, the Belgian, Fernand Khnopff. 
A visit to his house in Brussels gave me the first 
really complete understanding of his art. 
Everyone knows Khnopff’s work: those rare har¬ 
monies in pale colors, slender women with melan¬ 
choly features, fascinating heads, often maliciously 
cropped by the picture frame, whose eyes sometimes 
gaze coldly like those of Medusa, sometimes unfath- 
omably Sphinx like, whose terrible lips now seem of 
stone and again distorted to hysterical laughter; 
round about such visages, all kinds of ancient and 
precious articles are grouped by a highly refined 
taste. One could believe that the artist amused 
himself in a purposeless toying with pretty things. 
As a matter of fact he paints over and over only the 
inventory of his house, which he himself has conjured 
up: busts with mask-like aspect, fragile candela¬ 
bra, curtains hanging from thin golden rods between 
which vistas open away into marble white halls. 
His pictures not infrequently make the impression of 
a whimsical section out of the artistic whole which 
surrounds him and reflect his ideas and his dream 
like a magic mirror. The background of the “Ar- 
onslilie” gives as exact an impression of a Khnopff 
interior as if a camera had been set up in some cor¬ 
ner of his studio or passageway. 
The artist lives in the last house of a lonely street 
close by the beautiful trees of the Bois de la Cambre. 
Over the black door, which seems to shut before an 
unfathomable mystery, stands an inscription whose 
obscure meaning I was at first unable to explain, 
Passe-Futur. I thought I had gone astray, for the 
house had no number, or perhaps the owner was 
travelling. All the windows are tightly closed by 
curtains and no sound comes from inside; but an old 
servant appears and lets me in without a word, and 
at the same instant I think I hear a few musical 
chords which die away as if into the distance. My 
surprise is immediate. Instead of being in a “best 
room” I find myself in a little apartment with daz¬ 
zling white bare walls and only a bayberry tree in the 
corner. I think of a Burne-Jones picture and my ex¬ 
pectation is stretched to the utmost. 
Fernand Khnopff does not make the impression of 
a man of four dimensions. His appearance has 
nothing striking. He is a man of the world, of con¬ 
ventional manner and perfect French politeness. 
He offers to act as our guide, and now comes wonder 
upon wonder. Has Maeterlinck’s fiction come to 
THE ENTRANCE HALL 
88 
