Bourgeois Interior
1890/91
Georges Lemmen Belgian, 1865-1916
Belgium
This important study for a lost painting of the same name made its debut at the annual exhibition of the Belgian avant-garde society Les XX (The Twenty) in 1891. Georges Seurat had shown A Sunday on La Grand Jatte (1884/86; in the Art Institute’s collection) there just four years before. The most ambitious of Lemmen’s first Neo-Impressionist works, the composition depicts his sister, mother, and grandmother.
Charcoal, with stumping and black Conté crayon, with touches of white gouache, on cream laid paper, fixed