The mysterious and reclusive life of the convent is recurrent in Belgian symbolist literature and Mellery’s work.[1] For artists and writers of the turn of the century, entry into a religious order was a valid retreat from the inconsequential restlessness of life. In his 1889 Notes on Pessimism, Georges Rodenbach summarized a decadent stance: “It is necessary to practice renunciation, instead of delighting in things, become detached from them, and frozen in inaction awaiting the supreme promise, the immense peace of nothingness.”[2] The meditative world of the beguines provided the perfect vehicle evoking the nation's glorious past. In a fast-changing modern world, Mellery's art is consumed by nostalgia for a pre-industrial era. The otherworldly beguine, resurfacing in enigmatic dark drawings, is the opposite of a femme fatale. Instead, these somber sisters symbolize a life dedicated to serving all other living beings.

The mystical intimist Mellery died one hundred years ago on February 4, 1921. Only two monographic posthumous exhibitions took place since: in 1937 in Brussels at the Museum of Fine Arts and in 2002 at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Museum of Ixelles, Brussels. In the United States, Mellery was included in the first and last comprehensive exhibition on Belgian symbolism Belgian Art: 1880-1914 in The Brooklyn Museum in 1980. Although the Museum of Modern Art in New York owns an important drawing by the artist, it is never shown since it entered the collection in 1978. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has an important painting, The Doors, on long term loan but unfortunately no work is in the permanent collection.

Since its creation in 1830, Belgium's search for a cultural identity began. At the nation's semi-centennial exhibition in 1880, the necessity of an own style void of foreign influence became a prerequisite. In search of glorious times from the past, artists embraced the prosperous period of Flemish Primitives as the esthetic heritage of the country's pictorial tradition of realism. Continuing this cultural heritage, Mellery's symbiosis of idiomatic expressions with national artistic identity contributed to the development and global success of a national art, now known as Belgian Symbolism.

[1] Donald Friedman, in: Les XX and the Belgian Avant-Garde. Prints, Drawings, and Books c. 1890, Spencer Museum of Art, 1992, p. 284

[2] Georges Rodenbach, “Notes sur le Pessimisme”, in: La société nouvelle, 1882, p. 208