Fernand Khnopff: Portrait of Jeanne Kefer (Getty Museum Studies on Art)

Book Description
The Belgian artist, illustrator, sculptor, and photographer Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921) became a popular society portraitist in the 1880s, using elements that had served him well as an avant-garde symbolist painter: visual realism and a mood of silence, isolation, and reverie. As in the provocative yet hauntingly beautiful Portrait of Jeanne Kefer, which is the focus of this book, he frequently posed his models leaning against a closed door, flattening the space and resulting in a meditative, hermetically sealed image. Jeanne Kefer was the daughter of a composer friend of the artist, and Khnopff deftly captured the child's vulnerability to the outside world in the small gesture of her tiny thumb catching the edge of her bow. The book places this painting in the historical context of Khnopff's times and social milieu, such as the advent of symbolism as a literary and artistic movement and the influence of James McNeill Whistler. The analysis of the portrait is supported by a stunning array of related paintings, details, and technical photographs. Finally, the author uses Khnopff's portraits as a springboard for a broader discussion of symbolist art.


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A small girl stands with her back to the door of a drawing room in a bourgeois residence in Brussels in the 1880s. Her outfit and the setting tell us that she belongs to the prosperous middle class of Belgium, which had just celebrated its fiftieth anniversary of independence from the Netherlands. Soberly dressed, Jeanne Kefer fixes her eyes on the spectator with an intensity rare for her age. Magnified by Fernand Khnopff's brush, the little girl's presence is testimony to an adventure begun a year earlier in Brussels: that of Les XX (The Twenty), a group of avant-garde artists who, from 1884 to 1893, exhibited works by artists from across Europe chosen to incarnate the idea of modernity, from James McNeill Whistler to Vincent van Gogh, from Georges Seurat to James Ensor.


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