Portret van een aan een tafel zittende dame

In 1791 the old Dutch Republic still ran its own affairs, four years before French-backed revolutionaries swept it aside. That year a young painter named Willem Uppink, then 24, seated a well-dressed woman at a table and set down this small portrait, no bigger than a sheet of paper, about 33 by 30 centimetres. Her name has not survived. The picture belongs to a quieter corner of Uppink's work. He is remembered above all as the last of the Dutch behangselschilders, the craftsmen who painted the large decorative wall-hangings that lined the canal houses of Amsterdam, so an intimate early portrait like this is the rarer side of his hand. It belongs now to the Dutch national art collection and is catalogued among the Kröller-Müller Museum's holdings in Otterlo as B153.