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 inconsquential 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 peace of nothingness and the suspension of action emphasized by Rodenbach are evident in Mellery’s meditative monk. The spiritual servant becomes a figurative substitution for the symbolist artist engaged in a parallel quest for immanent divinity. Disengaged from worldly activities, the faceless friar’s existential being indicates silence, isolation, and waiting.

Mellery certainly contributed to the renewed interest in the gothic sentiment by placing Méditation in the Onze Lieve Vrouwe van Goede Hoop (Church of Our Lady of Good Hope) in Vilvoorde, near Brussels, an eccentrically located pseudo-basilica.[3] This church's beginnings date back to the fourteenth century, although the 1663 choir stalls depicting the Passion, faithfully depicted by Mellery, were a later addition, underscoring Vilvoorde position at the center of economic and strategic powers. By the 1860s however, the church was dilapidated and extensive restoration campaigns began. It is during this period when the church was decommissioned that Mellery's visit inspired Méditation. Mellery was possibly made aware of the church by his former teacher Jean-François Portaels (1818-1895), a Vilvoorde native. Portaels had contributed a twenty feet triptych to the church in 1852, reinstalled after the renovation in 1918 above the precious choir stalls.

[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

[3] Dr. Stefan Huygebaert of Ghent University kindly identified the church depicted.