Gabrielle-Élisabeth-Joséphine Canivet was born on December 17, 1867, in Etterbeek, Belgium, but spent her entire youth in Ghent. Her father was a customs director and amateur artist, who exhibited at the Brussels Salon of 1883. Gabrielle was inseparable from her two sisters: Louise and Hélène. The three Canivet sisters were very much involved in the artistic life in Ghent. In 1892, Gabrielle married the painter Constant Montald. Little is known about her artistic practice before her marriage, athough she was most likely taught by her father. Self-taught, she developed knowledge in the applied arts through paintings on silk with decorative motifs. Gabrielle decorated dresses and bodices, sometimes with painted silk or sometimes with gilding on black taffeta, and produced porcelain tableware.

"I never learned to draw. I discovered this gift out of laziness and coquetry. It was at the time when soutache was sewn onto collars and cuffs. I found this work long and unpleasant. I took a brush and glue paint. Instead of sewing, I painted. This paint did not hold, so I started looking for another product. The pencil followed my imagination. I managed to compose the patterns directly on the silk and to paint them using a process that is my own."

In 1897, the couple moved to Brussels, at 16 Avenue de la Renaissance in Etterbeek, to Gabrielle’s aunt’s house. Gabrielle quickly became close to Marthe Verhaeren, the wife of Émile Verhaeren, with whom Constant Montald was very close. Constant Montald embarked on a successful and accomplished professional career. His career was marked by significant events: the Prix de Rome, exhibitions, official commissions, and a professorship at the Brussels Academy. His activities contributed not only to his widespread recognition, but also to the development of his wife’s artistic influence.

It was not until 1906 that Gabrielle’s first works were discovered, at the Milan World’s Fair, where Montald presented La Lutte humaine, for which he received a gold medal. Gabrielle presented three painted boleros, four garments, three scarves, five bookbindings, four purses, one of which was made of pearls, and various fabrics in the section devoted to women artists and won a Grand Prix. The following year, Gabrielle confirmed her talent at the 5th International Art Exhibition in Barcelona and won her first medal, while the city’s Museum of Decorative Arts even purchased her entire fabric production.

The Montalds had recently moved into the couple’s new home in the Woluwe Valley. Surrounded by beautiful Chinese furniture decorating the living room, Gabrielle had a small studio in the attic. At this time, Gabrielle was already decorating fans and won the Countess of Flanders prize in the fan competition organized by the Société des Arts de la femme in 1909. The same year, she made a painted silk cover for the manuscript of Philip II that Émile Verhaeren wanted to give to Maria Van Rysselberghe. Gabrielle produced a whole series of bindings of painted silk glued onto cardboard, some of which were given to the Verhaerens. These bindings are almost abstract in style, and seem to echo a world of silence emerging from aquatic depths invaded by marine flora. Stylized water lilies, brown corals, peacock eye on a purplish or turquoise background spread their curves in very shimmering colors. Mushrooms, birds, fish, and marine worlds were already favorite themes. Other bindings on painted silk were executed by her for works by Maeterlinck, such as The Life of Bees. In 1912, she exhibited silk batiks at the Salon de La Libre Esthétique. It was mainly during the First World War that she began her series of decorative fish, mushrooms, and birds on silk using a process of which she had the secret and which preserved the fabric’s suppleness. She also sometimes used white, black, or red gouache on gold backgrounds. Her compositions were often inhabited by exotic flowers and a snail, which perhaps served as her signature. She depicted her birds surrounded by flowers using gouache and gold on a black background or simple pencil on Chinese paper. Her animal series continued until the end of her life.

For the Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts exhibition in Paris in 1925, Gabrielle received another silver medal for a series of decorative drawings. In 1929, an exhibition of the Montald couple opened at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, where Gabrielle again exhibited around twenty decorative drawings, still with birds and fish as their theme, but also painted fabrics and illustration projects. Her work was praised when it was mentioned by critics in an article in Le Soir on November 20, 1929: «Idealism, we find it again here in the works of Gabrielle Montald, whose interpretations of marine flora, black and gold, reveal, but with a modern understanding of drawing and composition, a close kinship with Persian illuminators and Japanese lacquer painters. We should stop in front of each of these marvelous decorative panels of rich invention and perfect taste.» Five more drawings of decorative birds were presented at the Salon de Printemps at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels from April 14 to May 6, 1934. On February 11, 1942, following breast cancer, Gabrielle died at the age of 74. From 1940 until her death, she maintained a copious correspondence with an admirer of Émile Verhaeren, René Vandevoir, to whom she confided many memories of her past.

In Gabrielle Montald’s artistic practice, one element frequently appears: gold. A symbol of immortality, absolute perfection, eternity,
and light, this dimension fits perfectly into the artist’s intellectual and moral approach. Gold is a material crafted from very thin
sheets, and applying them to canvas requires specific manipulations that only artistic training allows.

By departing from common artistic categories, Gabrielle Montald’s works guide us toward a heavenly, idyllic, fantastical, and imaginary reality. These terms are part of the same dimension: that of unreality and the extraordinary. Gabrielle and her husband,
Constant Montald, both use very different visual language and artistic practices, but they nevertheless share a common dimension:
idealism. Drawing on marine and terrestrial flora, she creates imaginary motifs that oscillate between exotic flowers and aquatic
plants. Water lilies, corals, foreign flowers, and others undergo extreme stylization to the point of becoming plastic forms almost
autonomous from reality. She patiently composes delicate fish or birds of paradise with the tip of her pencil or brush. Her compositions are filled with mazes of sinuous curves, repeated interlacing, knots forming organic patterns bordering on realism.