Jane Graverol (1905–1984), was a Belgian surrealist painter of French extraction. She was closely linked to the development of surrealism in Belgium. She would progressively consider her canvases to be “waking, conscious dreams,” and her encounters after the war with René Magritte, Louis Scutenaire, and Paul Nougé, then Marcel Mariën, with whom she collaborated on the periodical Les Lèvres nues, merely reconfirmed her in her beliefs. Her painting La Goutte d’eau is a collective portrait of the Belgian surrealists. She offered an original, dreamy version of feminine sensibility in painting, served by a figurative technique that was both precise and cold.
Jane Graverol was the daughter of the Symbolist illustrator and writer Alexandre Graverol. After studying at the Academies of Fine Arts of Etterbeek, she attended the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, where she studied under Montald Constant and Jean Delville. She initially made her name in the field of still life and landscape and had her first solo exhibition in 1927, but in the late 1930s she started painting in the surrealist style. In 1949, after writing to René Magritte, she met members of the Belgian Surrealist group and in 1953 helped to found in Verviers the Temps Mêlés group which had leanings toward pataphysics – the absurdist, pseudo-scientific, literary invention of the French writer Alfred Jarry. She was a co-founder of two significant surrealist publications – the Temps Mêlés, and in 1954 along with Mariën and Paul Nougé, the avant-garde review Les Lèvres Nues. In the 1960s, she made the acquaintance of André Breton, and later Marcel Duchamp in New York. Even though she subsequently moved to France, she stayed in close contact with the Belgian surrealist artists and exhibited in Belgium every year.