Richard Green Fine Paintings, London
Sale: Phillips, London, June 27, 2000, lot 17
Griffith, Dorset, United Kingdom
Private Collection

In his letter of October 5, 1899, to F. Viélé-Griffin, Théo van Rysselberghe wrote about this painting: “The emerging glory of Neo-Impressionism crosses the channel today, under the appearance of a little girl that an English man infatuated with vibrating painting asked me to paint [...] God Save the Queen! (in English).”  Van Rysselberghe executed his earliest Neo-Impressionist paintings in 1888, two years after his first contact with Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, but it was not until 1889 that he fully embraced the new style. By the time he painted the present work in 1899, van Rysselberghe was a leader of ❀this important artistic movement.

Together with Georges Lemmen, Van Rysselberghe was one of the very few painters to put the pointillist technique at the service of portraiture. He was also one of the few followers of Seurat who fully mastered the technique of applying paint in small dabs of complementary and contrasting color. The present work is an impressive example of his technical command and artistic expression. The artist depicts a young girl against a rich background of various green and red hues. Her pose and clasped hands are characteristic of the formal tradition of portraiture, and the bright, dynamic palette brings an individual charm to the work. The colors of the background complement her dress and she simultaneously separates from and fades into the backdrop. The red and yellow dabs begin to move onto the white of her left sleeve and appear in the strandꦉs of her blond ringlets. After 1898, van Rysselberghe began to move away from Neo-Impressionism, but this painting hearkens back to his Divisionist technique as evidenced by the tight pointillist brushwork of the background and her left sleeve, which creates an illusion of depth and dissolution.

At the date of publication of the catalogue raisonné in 2003, the present work was titled at upper center with the sitter's name, Margery.