Porträt der Irma Sèthe

By 1894 the small separated dots of Seurat's Paris had reached Brussels, and van Rysselberghe had become their leading Belgian exponent. His sitter was Irma Sèthe, a teenage violinist from a musical Brussels family, then studying under Eugène Ysaÿe, the celebrated virtuoso who taught at the city's conservatory. He shows her lost in the act of playing, bow drawn, eyes lowered. The whole pink shimmer of her dress is built from thousands of separate touches of unmixed colour, so the satin seems to catch and scatter light as you shift your position. The painter Paul Signac saw the finished portrait and noted in his diary a single verdict on it, extraordinarily delicate.