Self-Portrait with Brushes

Around 1929, when she painted this, Else Berg was in her early fifties and had been working in Amsterdam for about two decades. Her independence rested on something few colleagues had, a regular allowance from her family's cigar factory, which let her stay clear of commercial work. The Great Depression, which began in the autumn of 1929, would bring those payments to an end. Here she holds her brushes and palette, and her hard, direct gaze has been compared with the portraits of Charley Toorop, a painter Berg knew well. The hands are worth a look. By this time Berg had stopped trying to render hands and fingers precisely, and critics said she simply could not draw them. It was a deliberate choice by a painter whose early portraits and nudes show an exact knowledge of anatomy.