Portrait de Marguerite van Mons

In 1886 the ten-year-old Marguerite van Mons sat for this portrait in a season of fresh mourning. Her mother had recently died, and Van Rysselberghe painted her and her sister as a pair, dedicated to their grieving father, a Brussels art patron. The year matters for the painter as well. He belonged to Les Vingt, the Brussels circle that had begun inviting the American James McNeill Whistler to exhibit, and Whistler's taste shows here, in the severe black dress, the plain geometric background, the muted and restrained key of the whole picture. Whistler's quiet blacks suited a child in mourning. It was only two years later, in 1888, that Van Rysselberghe gave up this hushed manner for the bright, broken dots of pointillism.