Paul Delvaux was a Belgian painter noted for his dream-like scenes of women, classical architecture, trains and train stations, and skeletons, often in combination. He is often considered a surrealist, although he only briefly identified with the Surrealist movement. He was influenced by the works of Giorgio de Chirico.
Delvaux acknowledged his influences, saying of de Chirico, "with him I realized what was possible, the climate that had to be developed, the climate of silent streets with shadows of people who can't be seen, I've never asked myself if it's surrealist or not." Although Delvaux associated for a period with the Belgian surrealist group, he did not consider himself "a Surrealist in the scholastic sense of the word."
The paintings Delvaux became famous for usually feature numbers of nude women who stare as if hypnotized, gesturing mysteriously, sometimes reclining incongruously in a train station or wandering through classical buildings.
In the late 1950s he produced a number of night scenes in which trains are observed by a little girl seen from behind. These compositions contain nothing overtly surrealistic, yet the clarity of moonlit detail is hallucinatory in effect. Trains had always been a subject of special interest to Delvaux, who never forgot the wonder he felt as a small child at the sight of the first electric trams in Brussels.
In 1959 he executed a mural at the Palais des Congrès in Brussels, one of several large scale decorative commissions Delvaux undertook. He was named director of the Academie RFoyale des Beaux-Art in 1965. In 1982 the Delvaux Museum opened in Saint-Ibesbald. Delvaux died in Veurne in 1994.