Portrait of Guurtje Van de Stadt

In 1871 Claude Monet was a war refugee. France had gone down to Prussia, the short-lived Paris Commune was collapsing, and Monet, who had sat out the fighting in London, drifted on to the Netherlands and settled for about four months in Zaandam, a small town of windmills and water north of Amsterdam. There he painted around two dozen bright canvases of the harbor and the mills, and exactly one portrait. Guurtje van de Stadt was 17, the daughter of a well-off local timber family. Set beside his sunlit Zaandam views, her portrait is startlingly dark, almost all black and grey. The reason is quiet and specific: her father, Jan, had died that April, and the black dress, the ribbon and the earrings are mourning. The sitter kept the painting for the rest of her life, and only in 1984 did it pass to the Kroller-Muller Museum, where a 2018 cleaning lifted a yellowed varnish and brought back its cooler greys.