Marthe Massin
1860–1931 · Belgian painter, muse and collaborator of the poet Émile Verhaeren
Marthe Massin, also known as Marthe Verhaeren (Liège, 6 October 1860 – 2 June 1931), was a Belgian painter who is best known as the wife and muse of the poet Émile Verhaeren. She played a central role in preserving the memory of his life and work, devoting much of her later life to that task.
Born into a wealthy family, she trained at the Blanc-Garin private academy in Brussels, founded by the painter Ernest Blanc-Garin, which admitted women when the state academies did not. In 1889 she opened her own studio in her parents' house in Saint-Josse-ten-Noode. Her early works, shown at the Salon triennal in 1884 and the Salon de Voorwaarts in 1889, focus on cityscapes, peasant women and workers she observed during summers in Borchtlombeek and Bornem.
She met Verhaeren in Bornem in 1889 and they married on 24 August 1891. The marriage changed the work of both: the poet's writing moved away from its earlier torment toward collections of love poems, while Massin gave up teaching and made their shared life the subject of her drawings and paintings, including the garden and house. After Verhaeren's death in 1916, she devoted herself to his legacy, donating part of his papers to the Royal Library of Belgium in 1930 and bequeathing the remaining archive to the same library at her death. Most of her own work is held by the Archives and Museum of Literature in Brussels.