Woman in a Large Hat in a Summer House

In the autumn of 1911 the Moderne Kunstkring, an Amsterdam society for avant-garde art, held its first show at the Stedelijk Museum, and the Netherlands met the Cubism of Picasso and Braque for the first time. Leo Gestel sat on the society's board. Two years later he painted his friend Else Berg, a fellow painter, in a garden summer house, and the result is brightly coloured and more an exercise in that new angular style than a lifelike portrait. Berg holds a cigarette, a detail many people at the time thought unwomanly and provocative. The two knew each other from Amsterdam and worked side by side in Bergen, a village in North Holland popular with artists. The following spring, in 1914, Berg and her partner, the painter Mommie Schwarz, spent a long stay on Mallorca together with Gestel, and there they pushed their work further toward Cubism.