The painter, draftsman and illustrator Xavier Mellery is considered a precursor of Belgian Symbolism. During his academic years Mellery committed himself to the study of nature, antiquities and historical composition, for which he won the Prix de Rome in 1870. Spellbound by the many fresco’s he encountered in Italy, he aspired to create a peinture d’idées without abandoning realism: this would become his lifelong artistic goal and the basis of his symbolist work. His involvement in the Salon Pour l’Art and Les XX, and contact with Octave Maus and Émile Verhaeren, confirm his contribution to the symbolist movement.

When Charles de Coster invited Mellery in 1878 to produce illustrations for his Isle of Marken, it propelled his artistic output towards the Naturalistic movement of the Belgian avant-garde. Similar in spirit to the neo-gothic style of Bruges, the traditional costumes worn by the isolated islanders of Marken were based on sixteenth century fashion. Although there is different garb for the different seasons, for weddings and funerals, in general the clothing is egalitarian in that the entire community wears the same, making no distinction between the fishermen and the elite. Marken was to Mellery what Brittany was to Gauguin: a lost paradise. Mellery’s year-long stay on the island represented a turning point in his career: distancing himself from his academic training, he introduced ideas of social conditions, heredity and environment as inescapable forces in shaping human character. Portraying the inner life of things, the meditative silence, achieved through the use of a restricted palette, Mellery veils the mundane of everyday life as mysterious and enigmatic.

While large colored drawings by Mellery rarely appear on the art market, the majority of drawings are small sketches, executed in black washes most likely after nature during his stay on the island. These sketches would become source material throughout his career, small scenes and tableaux later worked into imaginary compositions.

Mellery wasn't the only visitor to Marken, north of Amsterdam, in the late nineteenth century. As it evoked Holland's Golden Age and its national glorification, writers and plein air artists were soon followed by mass tourism. Everything typical Dutch appealed to the imagination of countless artists in the nineteenth century such as Turner, Monet, Picasso and Whistler. Although the point of departure may have been initially their seventeenth century predecessors, soon artists also flocked to Marken, Volendam and many other communities appearing frozen in time. The contrast of the traditional idyllic lifestyle on the island with the developments of the industrial areas and its poor working condition towards the end of the nineteenth century especially appealed to artists whose concern was the plight of the farmer and worker.