Portrait of Mrs. Olga Wüste-von Gotsch

On 5 August 1890 a baroness from Prussia laid the foundation stone of a nursery school on her estate at Spaarnberg, near Haarlem. Olga Wüste, born von Gotsch, had inherited the land, and the school she built there took boys and girls of every class and religion, in decades when Dutch schools were increasingly split along religious lines. Locally she became known as the philanthropist of Santpoort, the village where the estate lies. In 1912, in her sixties, she commissioned this portrait from Thérèse Schwartze, the portraitist of Dutch high society, who drew it in pastel on cardboard and signed and dated it in the upper left corner. The school building still stands on a street now called the Wüstelaan, listed as a national monument, and the stone with Olga Wüste's name is still set into its front wall.