Portrait of the Artist's Sister

Discussion

FROM THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO’S CATALOG

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.

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