This monograph investigates the work of the Belgian Surrealist painter Paul Delvaux, a colleague of Rene Magritte's whose best-known works feature odd groupings of female nudes who stare into space, transfixed, while making enigmatic gestures in Surreally mismatched settings--for example while walking down an empty street, reclining in a train station or gathering in a complex of classical buildings. Sometimes these haunting muses wander through space accompanied by a skeletons; other times, they sit silently in long and sombre Puritanical dresses, as if serving out a penance.