Christina Currie

Introduction

On the advice of the Paul Delvaux Foundation in St Idesbald, an unsigned painting — a striking skeleton draped in a blue cape — was brought to the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA) for technical examination. The goal: to determine its status, dating, and authorship.

At first glance, the work’s composition echoed Delvaux’s skeleton studies and paintings from the 1940s–50s. Combined with the curious oral provenance, the possibility of a Delvaux was tantalising. But as the investigation unfolded, infrared reflectography (IRR) began to tell a different story — one involving underdrawings, colour notes, carpenter’s tools, and an unexpected collaborator from Delvaux’s inner circle.

What follows is the step-by-step unravelling of this puzzle, from attic find to new attribution.

Fig. 1 — Front view of Standing Skeleton with a Blue Cape (normal and raking light).
The unsigned and unfinished painting as it appears today, after removal from the stretcher. The blue cloak and skeletal form suggest a Delvaux influence, but the setting and execution hold deeper clues (Photos:  CC-BY KIK-IRPA, Brussels, normal light:  x143804; raking light: x143805).

Provenance: From the Workbench to Wilrijk

According to its current owner, the skeleton painting entered her family in the mid-1950s. Her late mother, passing a house clearance in Acacialaan, Wilrijk, rescued the canvas from a pile of discarded items.[1] That address — number 52 — was said to have been occupied by Paul Delvaux’s mother-in-law from his second marriage.

The connection seemed plausible. In his memoirs, Maurice Debra recalls that on 23 September 1949, Delvaux and his future wife, Anne-Marie “Tam” De Maertelaere, stayed briefly at Tam’s mother’s house in the Acacialaan after leaving Claude Spaak’s home in Choisel.[2] Delvaux reportedly visited often, even purchasing the house for his sister-in-law.[3]

When acquired, the skeleton was hidden on the reverse of another painting: Christ Being Stripped of His Garments. This religious scene, also unsigned, was painted directly over the re-stretched skeleton canvas. Both works were in poor condition, with active flaking, deformations, and a patched tear in the skeleton’s lower leg.

Fig. 2 — Reverse of the canvas: Christ Being Stripped of His Garments (normal and raking light).
Painted directly on the back of the skeleton scene, this unsigned Passion subject shows stylistic links to Emile Salkin’s work: see below,
fig. 10 (Photos:  CC-BY KIK-IRPA, Brussels. Normal light: x143800; raking light: x143801).

The Technical Investigation

Once the canvas was removed from its stretcher, the skeleton emerged in full view. IRR[4] revealed its hidden history in three phases:

Fig. 3 — Infrared reflectogram of the skeleton painting and annotated image showing location of underdrawing lines.
IRR reveals the underdrawing: precise pencil grids, ink outlines, and abandoned architectural elements not visible to the naked eye (IRR image: CC-BY KIK-IRPA, Brussels, ir001386l; diagram: CC-BY KIK-IRPA, Brussels, x143804).

1. The Perspective Grid and Architecture

Fine ruled pencil lines established a perspective grid on the left wall; heavier hand-drawn lines, some subsequently strengthened in black ink, marked architectural features. Floor tiles were drawn directly in ink, without preliminary pencil. Abandoned parallel verticals and horizontals hinted at never-realised mouldings or skirting.

2. The Skeleton and Hidden Motifs

The bones and blue cloak were sketched in graphite, with vertical pencil lines trailing the spine. More intriguingly, to the right of the cloak, IRR exposed underdrawn motifs unrelated to the final scene — shapes that would later prove crucial in identifying the artist.

Fig. 4 — IRR close-up of hidden wall-hung carpenter’s tools.
These underdrawn motifs — band saw, lathing tool, carpenter’s square — appear in similar positions in Emile Salkin’s Standing Skeleton with Carpenter’s Tools (1947): see below, fig. 8 (Photo: CC-BY KIK-IRPA, Brussels).

3. Colour Notes
Inscriptions in wavery capitals marked intended hues: “OCRE,” “VERT,” “ROUGE” for the tiles; “VERT,” “BLEU” for the cloak. On the right femur, the word “ECLATS” suggested highlights. These annotations, as we shall see, pointed toward a different hand than Delvaux’s.

Fig. 5 — Detail of colour notes in the underdrawing.
The block-capital inscriptions match those found in Emile Salkin’s preparatory sketches: see below, fig. 9 (Photos: CC-BY KIK-IRPA, Brussels).

Technique and Finish

The underdrawing lay on a thin, poorly adhered white priming. The paint was a mix of gouache or diluted oil, heightened with black ink outlines — a combination giving the work a graphic punch. The blue cloak was rapidly brushed in, the pink walls roughly criss-crossed, and floor tiles scraped back to suggest depth.

These elements, combined with its unfinished state and lack of signature, suggest that the work was a study — an experiment rather than a finished painting intended for sale.

Fig. 6 — Detail of skull.
Use of mixed media: paint applied with a brush and heightened with pen and ink (Photo: CC-BY KIK-IRPA, Brussels: x143808).

Delvaux’s Skeletons — and the Limits of the Comparison

Paul Delvaux’s fascination with skeletons was lifelong, rooted in childhood encounters with anatomical displays.[5] His compositions from the 1930s–50s teem with skeletal figures, from Duelling Skeletons (1934) to the Passion of Christ series (1949–57).[6]

Yet Standing Skeleton with a Blue Cape does not match any known Delvaux composition. While the pose recalls his Royal Museum of Natural History studies from 1942–45,[7] the flooring and walls are different. During this period, none of his skeletons wears a cape, and even when capes appear on skeletons in his later religious paintings, they drape from the top of the skull, rather than the shoulders. Although we have not examined many of Delvaux’s paintings in IRR, his annotations in his sketchbook drawings of skeletons — when they appear at all — are in his flowing cursive, not block capitals.[8].

Fig. 7 — Delvaux’s large watercolour and gouache studies made in the Musée royal d’Histoire naturelle de Belgique in the early 1940s.
Left: Skeleton in Blue Cape (Photo: CC-BY KIK-IRPA, Brussels: x143804); Centre: Paul Delvaux: 105 x 69 cm, inscribed ‘Au musée de l’histoire naturelle’ ‘December 1942 to April 1943’ in the lower right, private collection (Photo: 150 ans de Sciences naturelles, p. 50); Right: Paul Delvaux: 98 x 68 cm, signed, inscribed and dated in the lower right, ‘P. DELVAUX / D’après nature au Musee d’histoire naturelle Juillet-Août 1942’, sale Bonhams, Paris, 29 March 2023, lot 118 (Photo: website Bonhams).

Enter Emile Salkin

Delvaux’s close friend Emile Salkin (1900-1977)[9] also painted skeletons in the 1940s, often in tiled interiors derived from the same museum visits.[10] Three Salkin skeleton paintings from 1945–47, all on panel, share the same scale and similar tiled flooring. Two of the three are full oil paintings in which the skeletons are set against sharply receding backgrounds, as in the present study.

The third, a partially finished study, signed and dated 1947, is particularly revealing.[11] Like the Skeleton in the Blue Cape, it has a mixed media technique, and pen-and-ink precision. Behind its standing skeleton are carpenter’s tools — band saw, lathing tool, carpenter’s square — either hanging on the wall or held in racks. In Standing Skeleton with a Blue Cape, IRR uncovered similar wall-hung tools in nearly the same positions. Even the abandoned architectural lines correspond.

Fig. 8 — Top left: Emile Salkin’s Standing Skeleton with Carpenter’s Tools, signed and dated ‘E. Salkin 1947’, Oil and ink on panel, private collection. Shows identical technical approach, similar perspective setup, and matching tool arrangement (Photo: Sotheby’s Paris July 2020); Top right: Standing Skeleton with a Blue Cape (Photo: CC-BY KIK-IRPA, Brussels: x143804); Bottom left: Emile Salkin, Museum of Natural History, 105 x 63 cm, oil on panel, signed and dated ‘Salkin 45’ in lower right: Salkin inv. 71 (Photo: Artcurial, sale 25 May 2023); Bottom right: Emile Salkin, Museum of Natural History, 100 x 80 cm; oil on panel; signed in lower right, c. 1945: Salkin inv. 75 (Photo: Wikipedia).

The Smoking Gun: Handwriting and Reuse

Colour notes in Salkin’s preparatory drawings, still in the family’s possession, are written in the same capital-letter style as those under the paint in the skeleton study.[12] Words like “OCRE” and other names of colours appear exactly as in the painting.

Fig. 9 — Salkin’s preparatory drawings with colour notes, private collection (‘Avila’, signed in top right, not dated, Salkin inv. 270; Lion: unsigned, undated, Salkin inv. 288).
The handwriting style directly corresponds to the skeleton painting’s annotations (Photos: Atelier Emile Salkin; IRR (CC-BY KIK-IRPA, Brussels)).

Salkin was also known to reu.se supports.[13] The reverse painting of Christ Being Stripped of His Garments shows the same stylised figures and brushwork as an unpublished Salkin study of a Roman soldier — strengthening the link between the two sides of the canvas.

Fig. 10 — Details from Salkin’s Roman Soldier study, private collection (gouache on paper, inv. 81, unsigned, undated) and details from painting on reverse side of Skeleton in Blue Cape Salkin’s brushwork, palette, and figure style correspond to the painting of the reverse (Christ Being Stripped of his Garments), reinforcing the reuse attribution (Left Photo: Courtesy of Atelier Emile Salkin; Right Photo: CC-BY KIK-IRPA, Brussels, x143800).

Conclusion: Case Closed

All the evidence — composition, technique, underdrawing motifs, handwriting, and canvas reuse — converges on one conclusion: Standing Skeleton with a Blue Cape is not by Paul Delvaux, but by his friend and sometime collaborator Emile Salkin, likely painted circa 1947.

Unfinished and unsigned, it was probably an experimental piece kept in Salkin’s studio until reused for a religious study. Decades later, rescued from a house clearance, it was finally unmasked through technical study.

Acknowledgements
Sophie De Potter (IRR), Stéphane Bazzo (photography), Claire Toussat & Elisabeth Van Eyck (textual suggestions).

Notes

[1] As told to the author by the owner of the painting (email correspondence, 2 August 2020).

[2] Debra, 1991, p. 182; the stay at Tam’s mother’s house after the flight from Choisel is also mentioned in Carels and Van Deun 2004, p. 149.

[3] As told to the author by the owner of the painting (email correspondence, 2 August 2020).

[4] Infrared reflectography carried out at the KIK-IRPA by Sophie De Potter with an Apollo Infrared Camera (for technical specifications, see: www.opusinstruments.com/cameras/apollo-camera/ (consulted on 19/08/2025)).

[5] Delvaux often explained to biographers that at the age of seven, he was traumatised by the sight of two grimacing skeletons in black cages, one of a human, the other of a monkey, in the music room in the Athénée de Saint-Gilles known as ‘le musée’ (Ghêne and Anrieu 2004, p. 19, and Debra 1991, p. 135).

[6] On Delvaux’s attitude to skeletons, see Ghêne and Anrieu 2004, p. 19, p. 126 and Ollinger-Zinque and Leen 1997, p. 26.

[7] On Delvaux’s visits to the museum, see Quintart 1997.

[8] Paul Delvaux, Sketchbook, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, inv. 10688, 1942. See MRBAB sketchbook. See also Paul Delvaux, Sketchbook, MOMA, c. 1939-44, object number 1230.1964.28. See MOMA sketchbook.

[9] On Emile Salkin, see Nyssen 2005; Nyssen 1975; and Tournai 1997.

[10] ‘Pendant la guerre également, Emile et moi allions au Musée d’Histoire naturelle au parc Leopold ou nous avons fait plusieurs études du squelette humain. Je me rappelle une toile d’Emile avec le squelette au premier plan dans une grande perspective de pavés montrant la grande salle où nous travaillons. Il a fait à ce moment-là de nombreuses et très intéressantes études de squelettes… Apres la guerre, il travaillait la journée à des portraits et à des compositions et le soir donnait le cours de dessin à l’Académie d’Anderlecht… Il a ensuite habité rue Bodenbroek où il a beaucoup travaillé à des compositions de nus et de squelettes…’ [During the war too, Emile and myself went to the Museum of Natural History in the Leopold park where we made several studies of the human skeleton. I remember a canvas of Emile’s with a skeleton in the foreground set in a perspective framework of tiles showing the large room in which we worked. He made many very interesting studies of skeletons at that time … After the war, he worked during the day on portraits and compositions and in the evenings gave the drawing class at the Anderlecht Academy… He then lived in Bodenbroek Road where he worked a lot on compositions of nudes and skeletons…]’. Extract from ‘Une lettre de Paul Delvaux, Bruxelles, le 17 février 1975’, in Nyssen 1975, unpaginated; reprinted in Tournai 1997, pp. 19-21.

[11] Emile Salkin, Skeleton, signed and dated 1947 in lower left; India ink, pencil and gouache on Masonite (stamped with the studio mark ‘ATELIER E. SALKIN’ and numbered ’78’ on the reverse). Offered for sale at Sotheby’s Paris on 23 July 2020 as part of the ‘Addiction / Benjamin Steinitz’ sale (lot unsold) (URL consulted on 19 Augustus 2025).

[12] I thank Stéphane Salkin for coming to the KIK-IRPA on 7 September 2021 and discussing his father’s painting and working practice and for showing me his personal photographic database of paintings and drawings still in possession of the family. A detailed inventory of works remaining in the studio, started by Salkin’s widow in 1977, has been continued by Stéphane Salkin.

[13] According to Stéphane Salkin, his father had a habit of reusing the reverse sides of canvases and sketches on paper to make new works (conversation, 17 September 2021).

Bibliography

Carels and Van Deun 2004

Guy Carels and Charles Van Deun, Paul Delvaux. His Life, Antwerp, 2004.

Debra 1991

Maurice Debra, Promenades et entretiens avec Delvaux, Gembloux, 1991.

Ghêne and Anrieu 2004

Pierre Ghêne and Paul Anrieu, Paul Delvaux raconte…, Nivelles, 2004.

Nyssen 2005

Hubert Nyssen, ‘SALKIN, Émile’, in Nouvelle biographie nationale, 8, Bruxelles: Académie royale des sciences, des lettres et des beaux-arts de Belgique, 2005, pp. 331-332.

Nyssen 1995

Hubert Nyssen, Salkin. Présentation de Hubert Nyssen, suivie d’une lettre de Paul Delvaux, Editions Irene Dossche, Brussels, 1975.

Olliger-Zinque and Leen 1997

Gisèle Ollinger-Zinque and Frederik Leen, Paul Delvaux 1897-1994, Brussels, 1997.

Quintart 1997

Alain Quintart, ‘De squelette à squelette ou Paul Delvaux au Musée royal d’Histoire naturelle’, in Les Naturalistes belges. Etude et protection de la nature de nos regions, vol. 78, 2, avril-juin 1997, pp. 45-47.

Tournai 1997

Emile Salkin, Actes Sud. Maison de la culture de Tournai, 1997.