Artworks

In this striking reinterpretation of the classical myth, Suzanne Fabry depicts the moment in which Actaeon, having intruded upon the goddess Diana and her companions at their bath, is punished by being transformed into a stag and torn apart by his own hounds. Rendered in a muted, dreamlike palette and set against a stylised landscape, the scene is infused with both psychological tension and formal poise. Diana, calm and commanding, is flanked by two nymphs and a pair of hunting dogs, while the figure of Actaeon, metamorphosed into a stag vainly tries to flee to the left of the canvas.

Painted in 1944, Diana and Actaeon dates from Fabry’s most original and impactful period, spanning the 1930s and early 1940s. It was during these years that she developed her mature style - marked by a lyrical sensibility, a meditative monumentality, and an interest in idealised form inherited from her training under Jean Delville and Constant Montald at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Both were key figures in the movement known as L’art monumental, which championed public, culturally elevated art rooted in universal, often allegorical themes. Their influence, along with that of Fabry’s father, the Symbolist painter Émile Fabry, shaped her enduring engagement with classical iconography and the female nude.

In the history of twentieth-century art, the artist’s nude self-portrait remained an exceptionally rare and radical form. While painters such as Egon Schiele had used their own bodies to probe identity and vulnerability, these explorations were almost entirely undertaken by men. For a woman artist to depict herself nude, and to do so on a monumental scale, was a strikingly bold act. Fabry’s decision to model Diana and her attendants on her own likeness transformed a classical subject into a meditation on authorship and visibility: the female body, long treated as object, here becomes the means of self-definition.

A recurring motif in Fabry’s work from this period is the triple self-portrait - most clearly seen in works such as Triple Self-Portrait (c.1934) and Female Nudes by the Sea (1943), the latter of which is perhaps closest in style and date to Diana and Actaeon. Here too, the three nymphs are all self-portraits of the artist. Drawing on the visual language of the Three Graces—a motif Fabry would have seen echoed in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Rosa Triplex during her time in England at the National Gallery of British Art - she casts herself in three poses and psychological registers: one alert and confrontational, another introspective, and a third seemingly in motion. In doing so, she collapses the boundary between artist and subject, observer and observed. Her gaze, multiplied and refracted across the composition, becomes both mythic and autobiographical.

To create such a work in wartime Brussels was also an act of quiet resilience. In 1944, amid occupation and uncertainty, Fabry’s turn to classical myth was not escapist but purposeful: an affirmation of poise and creative control in a fractured world. The story of Actaeon - traditionally a warning against forbidden sight - is reimagined as a reflection on the act of looking itself, on who holds the power to see and to be seen. Through this transformation, Fabry asserts that the female figure is no longer a passive subject of desire but an instrument of authorship and endurance.

This self-referential strategy - placing herself into scenes of feminine archetypes - was a hallmark of Fabry’s practice in the 1930s and 1940s, and formed part of her broader project of reclaiming mythological and artistic canons through a distinctly modern, female lens. Like her Female Nudes by the Sea, where Fabry confidently steps into the roles of both creator and muse, Diana and Actaeon asserts the same dual position. With its neoclassical structure, painterly restraint, and psychodramatic undercurrent, the painting stands as a testament to Fabry’s powerfully individual voice.

Provenance

Art market, Antwerp; 2003

Private collection, Belgium; acquired above