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Portrait of the Artist's Sister
Georges Lemmen (Belgian, 1865–1916)
1891
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 62 × 51 cm (24 7/16 × 20 1/16 in.); Framed: 75.6 × 64.2 × 7 cm (29 3/4 × 25 1/4 × 2 3/4 in.)
- Culture
- Belgium
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Painting and Sculpture of Europe
- Credit line
- A. A. McKay Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
Belgian artist Georges Lemmen adopted the pointillist style—which used uniform dots or dabs of color to create forms—after seeing Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884 at an exhibition in Brussels in 1887. While most artists avoided this systematic and inflexible technique for portraits, Lemmen was one of the few who successfully applied it to a psychologically intense likeness. In this depiction of his sister, Julie Fréderique Lemmen, the artist captured what his daughter described as Julie’s “biting personality” while also signaling her vulnerability through her demure pose.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
