The Anxious City
painting by Paul Delvaux
The Anxious City (French: La ville inquiète) is a painting made by Paul Delvaux in 1940–1941. It depicts a large number of upset people, most of whom are nude or partially nude, in front of a lake and classical structures. Among the characters who stand out are a naked self-portrait of Delvaux, a man in a bowler hat and a group of bare-breasted women. The man with the bowler hat made his debut in The Anxious City and would appear in several other Delvaux paintings.
Critics have focused on The Anxious City's complex composition, disquiet atmosphere and possible origin as a reaction to the German invasion of Belgium. It has been compared to works by Antoine Caron, Nicolas Poussin and René Magritte. The Anxious City was first exhibited in Brussels in 1944 and was part of the 1954 Venice Biennale. It was last sold at auction in 1998.
Subject and composition
The Anxious City is painted in oil on canvas and has the dimensions 200 by 247 centimetres (79 in × 97 in). The Belgian painter Paul Delvaux created it between May 1940 and May 1941.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “The Anxious City” as painting by Paul Delvaux. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as painting by Paul Delvaux. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q124504982. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1940, 1941, 1944 and 1954.
Titles can refer to several editions, objects or performances, making precise identification essential before interpretation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Anxious City” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.