Bildnis Marguerite Khnopff

Marguerite was Fernand Khnopff's younger sister, and through the 1880s she became the face he returned to again and again, always cool, distant, faintly unreachable. He painted this portrait in Brussels in 1887, when he and his circle, the group called Les Vingt, were pushing Belgian art toward Symbolism and away from plain description. She stands almost dead-centre before a closed door, gloved, self-contained, her gaze sliding past us. Nothing in it is warm or anecdotal. Khnopff thought of her less as a person to record than as an image of an ideal, inaccessible woman. He never let the picture go. It hung in a room in his own house that he painted blue and kept as a kind of private sanctuary.