Jean de Boschère

Jean de Bosschère (Uccle, 5 July 1878 – Châteauroux, 17 January 1953) was a Belgian writer and painter.

After a tormented childhood, Jean studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts from 1896 to 1900. In 1909, he published his first collection of poetry, Béâle-Gryne, which he illustrated himself. The style of these illustrations, as well as his later work, was influenced by the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley and the spiritual works of French poet and dramatist Paul Claudel. De Bosschère was accused of Satanism in 1912, in response to his first novel, Dolorine et les Ombres (1911). In 1914, he made a trip to Italy. In 1915, after the outbreak of World War I, he fled from Belgium and went to London where he met writers such as Aldous Huxley and D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. De Bosschère illustrated numerous books in the '20s and '30s, including the poems of Oscar Wilde and Charles Baudelaire and erotic classics by Aristophanes, Ovid, and Apuleius. At the end of 1922, he left London and lived in Albano near Rome, followed by Brussels, Paris, and Solaia near Siena in Italy, where De Bosschère worked on his many novels and poetry collections. De Bosschère settled in La Châtre in central France in 1938.

De Bosschère's work was marked by a persistent search for spirituality and a fascination with the occult and the sexual. He wrote several novels, including two autobiographies, and two anthologies of most of his poetry, however, much of his work remains unpublished. In 1952, he was awarded the Prix de la Méditerranée (Mediterranean Prize) and the Mandat des Poètes.