Born in Maldegem in 1885 and deceased in Ixelles in 1973, Marnix d’Haveloose belonged to the generation of Belgian artists who successfully reconciled academic rigor with the expressive aspirations characteristic of fin-de-siècle Symbolism.

He began his artistic training at the Drawing School of Maldegem in 1894, before continuing his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bruges and subsequently enrolling at the Royal Academy of Brussels, where he studied under the sculptors Charles Van der Stappen (1902–1906) and Julien Dillens (1909–1910). He married the daughter of the painter Henry Cassiers (1858–1944) and settled in Brussels, where he moved within artistic and intellectual circles that were among the most receptive to modern developments in the visual arts.

Awarded the prestigious Godecharle Prize in 1910 for his bronze La Toilette, exhibited that same year at the Brussels Triennial (now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Liège), he subsequently undertook several study journeys to Italy, France, Germany, and England, whose influence can be discerned in the balance and refinement of his compositions. He later became a professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels (1935–1955) and subsequently Director of its School of Sculpture (1951–1954), where he advocated an artistic practice grounded in direct observation of the model and the primacy of gesture.

His work, distinguished by an approach to form that was at once sensual and spiritual, stands within the tradition of the great Belgian sculptors of the turn of the century while setting itself apart through its inner freedom and pronounced taste for monumentality. D’Haveloose regarded the work of art as an abstraction made visible. He created elegant yet powerful female figures (The Dancers, Salome), portrait busts, and commemorative monuments, as well as several public works in Brussels, including Amphitrite and Minerva with the Owl for the Palace of Justice, a statue for the main Heysel Exhibition building, and the sculptural decoration of the stairways leading to the Mont des Arts gardens. He exhibited widely, notably in Paris, Venice, Munich, Brussels, Ghent, Liège, Glasgow, and Riga.

From the 1930s onward, he championed a humanist and independent vision of artistic creation. In his essay Against the Spirit of System (Contre l’esprit de système), published in Cahiers des Arts (No. 7, December 1955), he declared that “the work of art is above all an act of freedom.”