Portrait of the Artist's Sister (1891): Artwork and History

Portrait of the Artist's Sister (1891) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as Georges Lemmen (Belgian, 1865–1916).

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the 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.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of the Artist's Sister
• Date: 1891
• Artist attribution: Georges Lemmen (Belgian, 1865–1916)
• Place of origin: Belgium
• Medium: Oil on canvas
• 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.)
• Type: Painting
• Department: Painting and Sculpture of Europe
• Reference number: 1961.42

Collection credit

A. A. McKay Fund

View the original

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The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.