Girl in a White Kimono

By the 1890s Japanese woodblock prints had swept through European studios, and Amsterdam was no exception. George Hendrik Breitner, usually a painter of the city's wet streets and working people, caught the fever after seeing a show of Japanese prints in The Hague in 1892. He began a series of about 13 canvases of a young woman in a kimono, and this white-kimono version, from 1894, is the best known of them. His model was Geesje Kwak, a milliner's shopgirl of 16. He also photographed her in the same kimonos and worked from the photographs back in the studio. There is a slight tension in the result, a Dutch shopgirl posed in the silk of an imagined Japan. When Breitner first exhibited the series, the critics were unimpressed.