This enigmatic painting haunts, suggests, and evokes—but it refuses to reveal all of its secrets.
Fernand Khnopff, I Lock My Door Upon Myself, 1891 (Neue Pinakothek, Munich). Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:04] We’re in Munich at the Neue Pinakothek, and we’re looking at the work of a Belgian artist, Fernand Khnopff.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:12] The title of the painting is “I Lock My Door Upon Myself,” from a poem by Christina Rossetti called “Who Shall Deliver Me?”
Dr. Zucker: [0:20] I’m always interested by the visual arts when they have a corollary in literature or in music. The way in which artists try to create a kind of alliance between the openness of words and the way in which we can visualize in our imagination. But how can that then be treated in something that we can see?
Dr. Harris: [0:42] I think it’s a real conundrum that painters since the Renaissance have tried to deal with, including artists like Botticelli. The stanza in the poem that this is from goes like this, “I lock my door upon myself, / And bar them out, but who shall wall / Self from myself, most loathed of all?”
[1:00] This is, in some ways, a religious poem about inner struggle. The way that God can, in the end, provide salvation. To me, this idea of inner struggle and inner turmoil is very much the subject of so many Symbolist paintings, this inner life.
Dr. Steven: [1:21] We have this image that is very narrow in its tonality, so that there is not much distinction between, for instance, these beautiful flowers, these lilies in the foreground, the space across this frieze almost creating a kind of rhythm that speaks to the rhythm of poetry.
Dr. Harris: [1:39] Or reminding me of a medieval painting, a triptych, in its tripartite division. And the woman in the front spans two of those parts of the painting.
Dr. Zucker: [1:50] That woman is not enacting anything in an obvious sense. There is no theatrical gesture. She is quiet and contemplative, but in a way that allows for the ideas of the painting to, in a sense, be embodied by her.
Dr. Harris: [2:05] Khnopff was inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites, who painted about 40 years before him.
Dr. Zucker: [2:11] The Symbolists are creating meaning by association, by feeling, and by symbol, as opposed to by an explicit narrative.
Dr. Harris: [2:21] And I would say symbols that aren’t very specific, but also open to interpretation.
Dr. Steven: [2:26] For instance, probably most evident is the sculptural head that’s on the shelf in the background. We know that it’s Hypnos, the god of sleep.
Dr. Harris: [2:36] The brother of Thanatos, the god of death.
Dr. Zucker: [2:39] Which seems to be completely in keeping with the mood of this painting.
Dr. Harris: [2:42] It does, doesn’t it? We have on the right side an image of a medieval townscape with a lone figure in it.
Dr. Zucker: [2:49] That figure seems to me to be a contemplative, isolated figure. The way that we might think about Friedrich’s monks earlier in the century.
Dr. Harris: [2:59] And then on the left side, we see a door, but we can’t really see the space that it opens into. Next to that, perhaps a mirror. And then beside that, a decorative floral pattern. We have the lilies that are in the foreground. We have a lot of things that don’t add up to a traditional narrative.
Dr. Zucker: [3:18] Right. When we expect to see lilies, we tend to see white ones, and it speaks to Mary’s virginity. These are not only orange lilies. They’re also dried. They’ve withered. There is something terribly melancholy about them.
Dr. Harris: [3:31] The female figure also looks off into the distance in a way that we can’t read what she’s feeling very clearly.
Dr. Zucker: [3:39] And as if that’s not enough ambiguity, there are other elements in here that are just tantalizing. Note the very fine chain that hangs down an unseen place in the middle of the canvas. There seems to be a little crown that hangs from it. Just to the right of that, in a rectangle, we can just make out what seem to be two circles, and what might be a face in the center.
Dr. Harris: [4:02] The figure rests on a table that is reminiscent of an altar. On it is a black cloth and a spear or an arrow. What do all of these mean? If we look for explanation in the poem, we’re not going to find it there. We’re not going to find a meaning anywhere. This is really about evoking a mood or a feeling.
[4:25] One way to think about that is that the Impressionists, who came just before the Symbolists, took the objective world and saw it through the lens of individual temperament. But in Symbolism, we have an inner world made objective, made manifest on the canvas.
Dr. Zucker: [4:44] In a sense, the interior subjective self made universal as it’s brought into the visual realm.
Dr. Harris: [4:50] We think about the title, “I Lock My Door Upon Myself,” this focusing on the interior life. It brings us inside ourselves to find our own meaning and interpretation.
[5:02] [music]
The essential aim of our art is to objectify the subjective (the externalization of the Idea) instead of subjectifying the objective (nature seen through the eyes of a temperament.¹
Fernand Khnopff, I Lock my Door Upon Myself, 1891, oil on canvas, 72.7 x 141 cm (Neue Pinakothek, Munich)
Painting and poetry
The aim of the Symbolists was to turn away from what they saw as the materialism of Impressionism. Instead, they sought to be evocative, to suggest a mood, or an abstract idea—to make their work analogous to poetry and music (neither of which depict the external world in a literal way). So perhaps it should come as no surprise that Khnopff’s painting, I Lock my Door Upon Myself (1891), takes its title and inspiration from a poem, “Who Shall Deliver Me?” by Christina Rossetti (the sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a Pre-Raphaelite painter who was an important influence on Khnopff).
A bastion against the vulgar world?
Female figure (detail), Fernand Khnopff, I Lock my Door Upon Myself, 1891, oil on canvas, 72.7 x 141 cm (Neue Pinakothek, Munich)
The poem’s title clearly recalls a biblical passage, “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” (Romans 7:24)—and the subject is an internal conflict from which only God can deliver us. In Khnopff’s hands though, Rossetti’s poem becomes a more general and secular meditation on inner conflict or mood. Yet the female figure, with her otherworldly stare, shows no sign of struggle.
Given the title and the stanza of the poem the title is taken from, are we to read the objects that surround the figure as “symbols” (in a personal, not literal, sense) of an inner struggle? Or perhaps we are not meant to look to the poem at all for the painting’s meaning—since Khnopff only took one line from it, “I Lock my Door Upon Myself.” If the latter is the case, then perhaps (as Michelle Facos suggests in her book, An Introduction to Nineteenth Century Art) the painting is about turning away from the world, similar to what Khnopff did in his personal life when he built a “fortress-like home” for himself in Brussels “as a bastion against the vulgar, outside world.”
Background (detail), Fernand Khnopff, I Lock my Door Upon Myself, 1891, oil on canvas, 72.7 x 141 cm (Neue Pinakothek, Munich)
In the foreground of the painting are the three distinct sets of withering, orange irises which punctuate the three-part composition. Aside from the curvilinear form of the woman locked behind a table of some sort (or is it an altar, or a tomb?), the painting is dominated by circles, squares and rectangles, and everything—including the woman herself—is painted in muted tones. It is as though Khnopff is suggesting that the “reality” we see isn’t very real at all.
What we see
In the first segment, reading from left to right, we see part of a circle, a truncated rectangle with a decorative floral pattern, another circle that may be a mirror, and the shallow recess of a doorway that doesn’t seem to open onto anything, with a window it that similarly looks out onto nothing.
Bust of Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep and a red poppy (detail), Fernand Khnopff, I Lock my Door Upon Myself, 1891, oil on canvas, 72.7 x 141 cm (Neue Pinakothek, Munich)
The next segment is divided into three horizontal bands framed by wide vertical planks. At the top is a shelf that holds a bust of Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep (brother of Thanatos, the god of death), and a red poppy. The bust is among the most sharply defined forms in the painting and its blue wing subtly echoes the red hair of the woman who sits below. In the right most segment, we see a lone figure in a desolate townscape reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea (1809).
Landscape with figure (detail), Fernand Khnopff, I Lock my Door Upon Myself, 1891, oil on canvas, 72.7 x 141 cm (Neue Pinakothek, Munich)
There are other objects in the painting that are even more mysterious, a small, crown-like charm dangles from above on a silver chain, a face perhaps, within two circles, on the lower right. And what is the long object on the table in front of the woman? And is that a spear beside her?
Of course we want to be able to read the painting, but so much of it is ambiguous and undecipherable. What we are left with is a mysterious and haunting image that speaks to the anti-materialist and inward-looking interests of so much art of the late nineteenth century.
The shift from modern life
Auguste Renoir, Pont Neuf, Paris, 1872, oil on canvas, 75.3 x 93.7 cm (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC)
This shift from modern life, to the inner psyche had many causes. It was, at least in part, a reaction against the rapid industrialization and urbanization that occurred in much of Europe in the nineteenth century. And similarly, it was a reaction against the art that had celebrated this new urban reality (see, for example, Impressionist paintings of the city such as Auguste Renoir’s Pont Neuf, Paris).
One response to the rapid intrusion of modernity—a response favored by many late-nineteenth century artists—was to turn inward, “whereas Naturalists, Realists and Impressionists concentrated on the appearance of modernity, Symbolists explored its emotional, psychological, and spiritual aspects and searched for a pictorial language that could convey the experience of modernity.”²
WHO SHALL DELIVER ME? (by Christina Rossetti)
God strengthen me to bear myself;
That heaviest weight of all to bear,
Inalienable weight of care.
All others are outside myself;
I lock my door and bar them out
The turmoil, tedium, gad-about.
I lock my door upon myself,
And bar them out; but who shall wall
Self from myself, most loathed of all?
If I could once lay down myself,
And start self-purged upon the race
That all must run ! Death runs apace.
If I could set aside myself,
And start with lightened heart upon
The road by all men overgone!
God harden me against myself,
This coward with pathetic voice
Who craves for ease and rest and joys
Myself, arch-traitor to myself ;
My hollowest friend, my deadliest foe,
My clog whatever road I go.
Yet One there is can curb myself,
Can roll the strangling load from me
Break off the yoke and set me free
