Trained at the Brussels Academy under the Symbolist painter Constant Montald, Ernest Faut then studied at the Louvain Academy under the teaching of the sculptor Constantin Meunier. Imbued with a misty melancholy, his landscapes, interior scenes, religious scenes, scenes of churches and beguinages all display a strong technique modulated by a delicate and sensitive chromatic palette, entirely in chiaroscuro. In the 1930s, his work is composed mainly of Symbolist scenes in the Art Nouveau style. Having become professor and then director for forty years until 1944 at the Louvain Academy, the works of Ernest Faut are exhibited in several Belgian museums, notably the Museum of Fine Arts of Ghent and the Museum of Fine Arts of Louvain.
Having inspired numerous works of art, music, and literature throughout the centuries, this narrative symbolizes the strength of love, the pain of loss, and the fragility of the human condition. Imbued with the esoteric Idealism of Jean Delville, Faut here chooses to reinterpret the myth under a biblical light. Elegant and androgynous, his neo-Greek figures reflect a quest for spirituality and eternity.
New parents of a renewed humanity, their bodies with serpentine lines oscillate between purity and sensuality. This iconography is part of the development of an art described as Idealist, close to Symbolism. According to Delville, the artist must be a “raiser of the spirit,” in search of a total spiritual and aesthetic communion—like this couple, embodying “the supreme harmony between two beings who escape together toward infinity.”
