Portrait of Madame Duchateau

What the museum knows about the woman in this portrait is her name. Madame Duchateau sat for Bernard in 1932, when he was 64 and working in Paris, and beyond the title the records say nothing about her. The painting's own travels are better documented. It belonged to a Swedish couple, Harriet and Sixten Karlin, and then to Bengt and Elin Ekström in Uppsala, who had gathered a group of Bernard's work and gave it to the Van Gogh Museum in December 1989. That gift is why a painter usually spoken of in connection with Brittany and Egypt is also represented in Amsterdam by late Paris portraits. This one is on cardboard, 80 by 60 centimetres, the same size as another portrait of a woman he made that year.