Bourgeois Interior

Description

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.

Provenance

Sold by the artist to Édouard Kohn (1825–1895), Paris, 1891 [Indianapolis 2014]. Kunsthandlung Gauss, Munich. Allan Frumkin (1926–2002), Chicago, probably by 1963 [Chicago 1963]; by descent to his wife, Jean, New York, from 2002. Jill Newhouse, New York, 2007. Art Research, Feldmeilen, Switzerland. Private collection, Belgium, by 2014; sold by Eric Gillis, Brussels, to the Art Institute of Chicago, 2015.

Bourgeois Interior

Georges Lemmen

1890/91

Accession Number

229007

Medium

Charcoal, with stumping and black Conté crayon, with touches of white gouache, on cream laid paper, fixed

Dimensions

47 × 59.3 cm (18 9/16 × 23 3/8 in.)

Classification

charcoal

Museum

The Art Institute of Chicago

Chicago, United States

Credit Line

Suzanne and Marjorie Pochter and Print and Drawing Funds