The painter, draftsman and illustrator Xavier Mellery is considered a precursor of Belgian Symbolism. During his academic years Mellery committed himself to the study of nature, antiquities and historical composition, for which he won the Prix de Rome in 1870. Spellbound by the many fresco’s he encountered in Italy, he aspired to create a peinture d’idées without abandoning realism: this would become his lifelong artistic goal and the basis of his symbolist work.

Mellery exhibited regularly at Les XX as an invited artist from 1885 (1888, 1890, 1892), and subsequently contributed to La Libre Esthétique (1894, 1895, 1899, 1908). He was a founding member of the salon Pour l'Art, and a member of Kunst van Heden, the Société Royale Belge des Aquarellistes and the Belgian Académie Royale. Mellery showed at the sixth and final Sâr Péladan’s Salon de la Rose+Croix in 1897. Soon after, he withdrew from public life and retired to Laeken, near Brussels, where he died in 1921.

During his last artistic phase, Mellery searched to create an allegorical art in which classically-inspired figures, set against flat, golden backdrops frequently accompanied by texts, expanded universal ideas or truths. Influenced by his visit to Italy in 1871 and a trip to Germany, Switzerland and Austria in 1887, they were generally conceived on a monumental scale for major public decorative cycles. Le Pouvoir communal, or Collective Power, is a preliminary design for an ambitious commission to decorate for Brussels's Palace of Justice, Europe’s biggest building project in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.[1] Although the murals were never executed, this monumental allegorical art remained an important quest in his search for and perfecting of what Mellery called the modern synthesis. This gold-ground drawing is connected to the slightly larger drawing inscribed with The Law and the City of Brussels. While the cycle was never realized, Mellery did exhibit reduced versions in Brussels and at Sâr Péladan's sixth and final Salon de la Rose+Croix in 1897 in Paris. Given that these ambitious decoration schemes never came to fruition, Mellery withdrew from public life and returned to Laeken, his place of birth, where he died in 1921.

[1] Vincent Vanhamme, Xavier Mellery. De ziel der dingen, Amsterdam/Brussels, 2002, pp. 73-78