IN a departure from Belgium’s usually reverent treatment of its royalty, the illegitimate daughter of King Albert II is about to publish a book attacking him for disowning her.

The autobiography of Delphine Boël, an artist, will be published next month and coincides with an exhibition of her work expressing bitterness towards the king. Some are accusing her of an anti-royalist plot to undermine a divided country but Boël, 40, insists that her grievances are merely a family matter.

“We’ve never had a big-time daddy-daughter relationship,” she said last week in her Brussels studio. “The last time I saw him I was 25 years old. I’ve tried several times to talk to him since then but he doesn’t want to know.”

Her blonde hair and blue eyes are traits of the Belgian female royals and the country has long acknowledged Boël, who is married with a daughter of her own, as the king’s “love child”, even if he will not talk to her.

She communicates instead through her art, which has been bought by dealers all over the world and will be displayed next month in a prestigious gallery in Ghent. It will not appeal to the person she would most like to impress. One of the papier-mâché sculptures shows Albert and Queen Paola as pigs.

“I’m blamed for doing things that are a little vulgar,” said Boël, smiling at her model of the Manneken Pis, the famous Belgian statue of a little boy urinating. Her version includes a giant phallus in the colours of the national flag. She is having a “limited edition” of 100 made up in time for the show.

One painting shows the face of the artist looking out through the door of a washing machine, a reference to the king’s “dirty laundry”. Another work is a photo album of brightly painted male and female genitalia. Photographs of these will appear in her book.

“Some people see it as a threat,” she added, “but I’m not anti-royalist. I don’t want to bring them down. It’s not to do with titles or money. I just want communication.”

She was born in 1968 to Sybille de Selys Longchamps, a baroness married to a Belgian steel magnate. Her father, who did not assume the throne until 1993, was a regular visitor when she was little. She nicknamed him Papillon, or “Butterfly”.

When Boël was eight, her mother took her to live in London. The lack of a father, she says, made her an unhappy child. “I spent a lot of time drawing dark suns,” she recalled. She went on to graduate from the Chelsea College of Art & Design.

She was 18 when her mother told her the secret of her birth and she continued to enjoy sporadic contact with the king, respecting his position that he could not acknowledge her in public. He would often telephone and sent “little presents” on her birthday.

Things changed, however, when the existence of an illegitimate child became public knowledge thanks to a book. Albert, whose affair with Boël’s mother had lasted for 18 years before he was king, confessed to what he called a former “crisis” in his marriage.

Boël and her mother, who lives in Belgium and the south of France, were besieged by the press but refused to comment. They turned to the palace for help. “My mother, who had kept his secret for so long, asked for protection but we were abandoned,” said Boël.

Boël, who was living in Notting Hill, west London, wrote to Albert in 2001 to inform him that her mother was ill, but received no reply. She eventually got him on the telephone.

“He said, in a really horrid way, ‘I’ve had enough of this, you’re not my daughter’,” she recalled last week. “I said, ‘Apparently I look like your mother, I have her eyes’, and he said, ‘Don’t ever say that again’. It was horrible to hear that. I had a lot of respect for him before that. He had a lot of space in my heart, but that was the end. It was finished.”

She channelled her disappointment into her art, particularly after the birth of Joséphine, her daughter, four years ago. By then she had returned to Belgium: “The birth triggered an emotion in me. How could he do that to his child? Nobody wants to be rejected by their parents. It was very hurtful.”

Boël produced a series of papier-mâché thrones. She painted Albert’s seal and tore it down the middle.

“I wanted people to know what was happening,” she said. “People thought that he had recognised me, that he was taking care of me, but he hasn’t.”

Boël, who is expecting her second child next month, has been accused of exacerbating a dangerous rift in Belgium between the Catholic, French-speaking Wallonia of the royals in the south and the Flemish-speaking Flanders in the north: one of the works going on display next month is a model of her holding the rival regional flags apart from each other.

She resents being turned into a political football, however. “It’s just a problem between me and my father,” she said.

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