Karen

In 1892 Jan Veth was one of the busiest portrait painters in the Netherlands, trusted to catch a real, living face. This small panel is deliberately not that. For a brief spell, around 1892 and 1893, he fell under the sway of his friend Richard Roland Holst and painted flat, stylised, almost decorative, closer to a Renaissance profile than to an ordinary likeness. The girl who sat for it was called Heintje, from the village of Huizen. Veth gave the finished head another name entirely, Karen, after the doomed dancer in Hans Christian Andersen's tale of the red shoes, the girl whose enchanted shoes will not let her stop. So the dark eyebrows and the full red lips belong to a real village girl, while the title reaches for a fairy tale. A year later, in 1893, Veth returned to the same head in a lithograph, setting it inside a decorative border.