Belgian Institute
of Graphic Design

Researching the contributions of Maria Sèthe (1867-1943) to the art and career of her more famous husband, the architect Henry van de Velde (1863-1957), is a charged experience. It requires negotiating expectations and hopes — both those of others and our own — as well as pushing against disciplinary boundaries. Her life and creative work reveal the tensions between “neat” and “messy” design history: “Neat history is conventional history: a focus on the mainstream activities and work of individual, usually male, designers. Messy history seeks to discover, study and include the variety of alternative approaches and activities that are often part of women designers’ professional lives.”¹ Sèthe’s “messy” roles throughout her husband’s career are now relatively well-acknowledged. In addition to collaborating on artistic projects, she supported her husband in practical ways: she acted as a translator and accountant and supervised the manufacture of furniture. She also raised their five children.²

However, claiming a spot for her in the “neat” history of canonical Belgian design is more difficult because of her identity as the “wife of.” According to sociologist Ann Oakley, wifehood is “a political filter through which women’s lives are passed so as to yield a product which only partially records what they actually did.”³ This results in women being concealed behind men. They are not only forgotten but also often ignored, devalued, marginalized, or have their contributions distorted. However, unlike in other, more tightly regulated professions, marriage did not necessarily mean the end of a career for nineteenth-century women active in creative fields. Certain middle-class and elite couples believed in “the generative potential of marital collaboration when trying to foster fulfilling working lives.”⁴ The early letters of Sèthe to van de Velde show that she shared this hopeful perspective of a continuum between love, partnership, and work: “I was embroidering all afternoon in Dendermonde and I was already imagining myself working at your side and interrupting the work in search of your kisses, dear beloved. It was very sweet, I assure you.”⁵

Bloemenwerf, the couple’s first shared home located in the suburbs of Brussels, was intended to provide an ideal environment for this lifestyle of shared work. Its fluid internal organization around a central hall was meant to foster a life dedicated to art, in which both husband and wife participated in artistic creation. However, Sèthe’s ideal of working together proved difficult due to gender norms, childcare, and van de Velde’s frequent travels. She was nonetheless instrumental in the creation of Bloemenwerf: she conceived the garden, chose the colours for the house and its interior, sewed dresses that facilitated a progressive lifestyle, and designed wallpapers. In this text, we focus on this last activity as an example of graphic creative collaboration and explore how searching for evidence of authorship can perpetuate mechanisms of invisibilisation.

Sèthe before van de Velde

Sèthe grew up in a cultured, international, bourgeois family. Maria, Alice⁶ and Irma Sèthe⁷ were the daughters of Louise Seyberth, an opera singer and violinist from Wiesbaden, and Gérard Sèthe, a textile merchant from Amsterdam. When Maria Sèthe was born, the couple was living in Paris. They moved to Brussels in 1870 following the Franco-Prussian War. Maria Sèthe enrolled at the Héger boarding school, where languages, music, and drawing were taught. Around 1888, she and her sister Alice Sèthe took classes at the studio of painter Ernest Blanc-Garin. In 1893, Maria Sèthe continued her artistic training on a more informal basis in the studio of the painter Théo Van Rysselberghe.

Louise Sèthe played a key role in the artistic development of her three daughters. From childhood, they received musical and artistic training from their family and private teachers. Their mother held a salon in their home at 62 Dieweg in Uccle, where Irma and Maria came into contact with musicians and artists from the Les XX artistic group. Maria accompanied her mother and sister Irma on the piano, a passion that remained with her throughout her life.

She met her future husband while staying in Cadzand, Zeeland, with Théo Van Rysselberghe and his wife, Maria Monnom. Van de Velde was disappointed with his career as a painter at that point and was contemplating turning to the decorative arts. Sèthe, on the other hand, was keeping up with the latest artistic developments and had already visited William Morris’s shop in London.⁸ They bonded over their shared interest in the applied arts. In 1894, the couple married. After the loss of their first child, Louise Sèthe bought a plot of land on Avenue Van der Raey in Uccle for the young couple to settle on. There, van de Velde built his first house: Bloemenwerf. From 1896 to 1900, the couple lived in this cottage-style dwelling in the Brussels countryside before moving to Berlin and then to Weimar.

“A promise of flowers”⁹

Our investigation into the wallpapers created by Sèthe and van de Velde for Bloemenwerf was dotted with flowers, their use as motifs, and their gendered connotations. While van de Velde came to see floral ornaments as representative of a feminised, trivial sentimentality,¹⁰ Sèthe loved flowers in all their shapes and forms. She wrote about them in her letters, mentioning crocuses, primroses, peonies, columbines, young irises and wallflowers. She planted them in her successive gardens, including roses, white lilies, poppy seedlings and gladioli. She drew them, as shown in her various studies of dahlias kept at the National Library of Belgium (KBR).¹¹

Flowers were central to the couple’s early designs for Bloemenwerf wallpapers. Likely between 1893 and 1896, van de Velde and Sèthe created four wallpapers: Dahlias, Tulipes, Ancolies and Dynamographique. Although this is probably the best-known example of their collaborative work, their attribution remains thorny One of the main reasons why it is contested lies in the fact that authors follow van de Velde’s contradictory statements in his memoirs. At first, van de Velde attributed Tulipes and Dahlias solely to Sèthe:

Before becoming a pupil of the painter Van Rysselberghe, Maria had been a pupil of a very distinguished and tasteful draughtsman¹² who introduced her to stylisation. To decorate our house, Maria and I produced our first wallpapers. The first two, Tulipes and Dahlias, were entirely her work. The third, Encolies [sic], had little of the flower that inspired it. The fourth was entirely linear and dynamo-graphic [sic].¹³

Mention of a “Sèthe paper” in the lecture notes that van de Velde presented at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp in 1893 supports the attribution of the first wallpapers to Sèthe.¹⁴ However, there is a contradiction regarding the attribution of Dahlias when van de Velde recounts the visit of Siegfried Bing and Julius Meier-Graefe to Bloemenwerf:

The room we were talking in was the music room my mother-in-law had asked me to convert in her villa for her daughter Irma. The walls had just been wallpapered to my design: Dahlia. I had found the motif of the dahlia, stylised to the extreme, in a box in which my wife had kept some drawings she had made in the studio of Blanc-Garin, an art teacher who, at the time, enjoyed a certain reputation in Brussels. Bing and Meier-Graefe were raving about the happy effect of the harmony of amaranth, green and indigo blue on the paper, which was happily matched by the colour of the cedar wood in the furniture.¹⁵

Sèthe’s drawings from her training years might have served as a kind of “reservoir” from which van de Velde could draw inspiration, thereby cutting short the preparatory stages when beginning a new project. Later in his memoirs, he eliminated any reference to Sèthe’s authorship, stating that he designed the Dahlia wallpaper for his mother-in-law’s music room. He added that it was his “first [wallpaper] of its kind, but it was also the last for which I resorted to ‘stylisation’ […].”¹⁶

The confused attribution of the wallpapers by van de Velde reflects the lengthy process of writing his memoirs, which occupied him in the last ten years of his life. It also attests to an organic creative process in which roles are not predefined. For example, regarding an embroidery, van de Velde completed  “the squaring up of a drawing that Maria had prepared for an embroidery, based on a sketch found in one of her boxes.”¹⁷ Furthermore, the attribution of the early wallpapers to Sèthe and the later ones to van de Velde follows a certain logic, as noted by Werner Adriaenssens.¹⁸ Wallpapers with an obvious floral inspiration are attributed entirely to Sèthe. This is the case with Dahlias and Tulipes.¹⁹ Ancolies, which is more stylised, acts as a transition. The last wallpaper, composed of green and pink volutes and “entirely linear”, is implicitly presented by van de Velde as the culmination of a process. According to the architect’s theories, the line is an abstract principle with no reference to nature and is therefore superior to stylisation, achieved through the gradual simplification and geometrisation of patterns borrowed from nature.²⁰ As an element of visual language, the line came to characterise his architectural work and his creations for furniture, textiles and so on.

This inspiration and stylization of nature can also be found in the wallpapers and fabrics of William Morris that van de Velde sold and used at the beginning of his career. However, as early as 1894, van de Velde taught his students to prioritize line and color over figurative representation.²¹ At the same period, van de Velde distanced himself from certain English references, which had become too cumbersome.²² In an article published in Pan magazine in 1895, van de Velde distinguished between the wallpapers of Walter Crane, a painter and illustrator, and Charles F. A. Voysey, an architect: “Crane remains an illustrator in his Wallpapers, noting events in a limpid, barely conventional style [sic]; Voysey becomes a decorator, creating ornaments,” adding that the plague of wallpapers was “illustration.”²³ How was this gradual distancing from the English model and reference to nature perceived by Sèthe, who had introduced van de Velde to Morris’ work, and expressed a great love for flowers, plants and her garden in her letters? This stylistic and ideological evolution on van de Velde’s part coincided with Sèthe’s reduced creative investment over time. The gradual abandonment of floral motifs reveals the implicit and explicit gender dynamics in van de Velde’s work.

Instinctive vs. Scientific Colours

The wallpapers created for Bloemenwerf exist in several colours.²⁴ Those colour combinations are the result of an extended research process, as enlightened by a letter from Sèthe:

Today I had a bit of fun trying to find a tone for your rug design! I tried to apply a range of colours that I’ve been thinking about for a long time: amaranth violets, blues, greens and yellows. But how difficult it is to find the right rare tones! Anyway, I’m interested and passionate about it! It’s great that you’re looking after the dyes, love! You can tell me all about it when I’m in Antwerp. In any case, I’ll bring the blue fabric so that we can look for the colours for the curtain design.²⁵

During the first few months of her relationship with van de Velde, Sèthe worked on an embroidery with a flower pattern, based on a design by her fiancé. Her letters from this period show how much time she devoted to colour research. Sèthe’s choices for her embroidery were not made by chance. She followed the principle of colour complementarity and sought to contrast colours: “It is above all a reaction green for the amaranths that we shall have to look for as soon as you are here.”²⁶ Sèthe’s familiarity with the theories of modern art inspired by science may have come from van de Velde, but it may also have come from her artistic training or her friendship with Théo Van Rysselberghe, a Neo-Impressionist painter. She sometimes sought van de Velde’s advice, asking, “You will guide me, won’t you, in the combination of colours?”²⁷ However, she could also be direct about the silks van de Velde supplied:

The dark green is fine, but the other is impossible. So I am sending you a new sample of the one we need. To make it easier to choose the bronzed green for the lower branches, I am sending you, on the same sheet, 1° the bronzed green, 2° the green for the upper branches; 3° the green you gave me yesterday that cannot be used.²⁸

Sèthe did not hesitate to change everything at the last minute, preferring a certain harmony to the rigorous application of amaranth and green or blue and orange contrasts:

Thank you, my love, for the silks. One of these oranges is the right value, but all of a sudden I have this immense desire to do away with all the oranges and keep only the harmony of amaranths, blues and greens, and if necessary just vary the values of these tones. We’ll look at it together, and you can give your opinion, which I’ll follow, I love you so much!²⁹

The writings of van de Velde and Sèthe reveal a contrast between a scientific approach to colour and one born out of “desire” or “fun.” This disparity ties in directly with gender stereotypes. In Made in Patriarchy, Cheryl Buckley demonstrates how Sonia Delaunay “is noted by historians for her ‘instinctive’ feeling for color”, while Robert Delaunay “is attributed as having formulated a color theory.”³⁰ However instinctive, Sèthe’s experimentation and sustained engagement with colours lie at the basis of the Bloemenwerf choices, as she wrote to van de Velde: “while looking for tones for the bathroom here, I found a beautiful green for our door and also a grey.”³¹