Portrait of the Artist’s Sister

Georges Lemmen

Belgian, 1865–1916

Oil on canvas

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.