He was influenced by the works of Giorgio de Chirico and René Magritte, but developed his own fantastical subjects and hyper-realistic styling, combining the detailed classical beauty of academic painting with the bizarre juxtapositions of surrealism.

His mother was the musician Laure Jamotte, who became a strong, dominant presence in his life, directing, controlling, and repressing his childhood and adolescent desires.

It was soon evident that he had no skills or interests in business or law, and he was grudgingly allowed to study architecture at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts despite his ambition to become a painter.

[18][7] Initially, Delvaux was influenced by the style of 19th-century French and Belgian academic painting as represented by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres or Puvis de Chavannes.

[7] Delvaux's paintings of the late 1920s and early 1930s began to feature nudes in landscapes, and were strongly influenced by such Flemish Expressionists as Constant Permeke, Gustave De Smet, Frits Van den Berghe, and the palette colors of James Ensor.

In 1932, Delvaux found fresh inspiration in visits to the Midi Fair (Foire du Midi [fr]) in Brussels, where the Spitzner Museum (Musée Spitzner [fr]), a collection of medical curiosities, displayed wax models of bizarrely deformed anatomical specimens and diseases, including syphilis.

[25] The exhibit also maintained a booth in which skeletons and a mechanically breathing Venus figure were displayed in a window with red velvet curtains.

In the mid-1930s Delvaux also began to adopt some of the motifs of his fellow Belgian René Magritte,[29] as well as that painter's deadpan style in rendering the most unexpected juxtapositions of otherwise ordinary objects.

"[34] As Marc Rombaut has written of the artist: "Delvaux ... always maintained an intimate and privileged relationship to his childhood, which is the underlying motivation for his work and always manages to surface there.

The artist's own continuing awkward presence in his paintings, along with skeletons and various male characters from Jules Verne novels, were a counterpoint to his idealized female nudes, who gradually became more relaxed in their elegant beauty.

[38] His painting La ville inquiète ("The Anxious City", 1941) reflects both the chaotic worries and the uncanny everyday routine of his environment.

[40] In the post-war years, Delvaux continued the productive period he had started under the German occupation, painting many works that would later establish his reputation.

"[38] In 1946, he experimented briefly with exaggerated perspectives and a flattened picture plane, as shown in Les cariatides ("Caryatids") and La ville noire ("Black City").

[43] From 1950 to 1962, Delvaux served as professor of "monumental painting" at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Arts et d'Architecture de La Cambre, Brussels.

[19] In the late 1950s, he turned temporarily from painting nudes to producing a number of night scenes in which trains are observed by a little girl in a dress, viewed from behind.

[49] 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 1952, Delvaux collaborated with Emile Salkin and three students from La Cambre to produce a wall mural at the gaming room in the Ostend Kursaal, portraying a Roman-style classical dancing scene with a large mermaid in a prone posture.

They portrayed women in either contemporary or classical costume in Greco-Roman architectural settings, contrasting with one panel depicting an all-male dining table scene.

He exhibited his paintings of religious scenes enacted by skeletons, but the show was censored for heresy by Cardinal Roncalli (who would later become Pope John XXIII).

[56] In 1976, Delvaux attended the formal transfer of the painting to a lecture hall at the Archives et Musée de la littérature [fr] (part of the Royal Library of Belgium) in Brussels, where it remains publicly visible today.

It foregrounded women in classical garb outside a Roman-style villa, while in the far background (upper reaches of the mural) the figures were nude.

[59] In 1966, Delvaux began working with the 22-year-old model Danielle Caneel, using her slim figure as inspiration over the next 17 years in numerous drawings and studies.

It shows a surreal outdoors panorama, depicting "the cave, the thick forest, the naked or dressed girls, the trains and tracks meticulously illustrated in the small station, the lights and electricity poles, the moon, the mailbox".

[78] In addition to these systematic studies, he also made a lesser number of "spontaneous" drawings as independent artworks, more expressive and improvisational in quality.

[79] Once he actually had started a major painting, he continued to modify his layout, erasing, moving, or replacing different elements to perfect his artwork.

[81] Delvaux became famous for paintings usually featuring one or several nude or semi-nude women who gaze languidly into space as if hypnotized, gesturing mysteriously, sometimes reclining incongruously in a train station or wandering through classical buildings.

[82] The settings are often commonplace moonlit urban scenes or classical ruins, depicting absurdist tableaus with a dream-like precision clarity.

[43] The gaze of the viewer is central to his paintings, often modulated by unusual viewpoints and multiple vanishing points, windows or openings, and mirrors.