Georges Lemmen (1865-1916)

Portrait de Madame Dumont Wilden, 1909

Gouache on artist's board 29 5/8 x 21 1/8 inches (75.4 x 53.8 cm.) Monogrammed & dated '19 GL 09' 'AVRIL'

Provenance Hotel des Ventes Saint-Georges, Brussels, 26 March 1997, lot 190 Galerie Maurice Tzwern, Brussels, 1998 Private collection, United States

Note The son of a Brussels architect, Lemmen entered the Fine Arts Academy in Saint-Josse-ten-Noode in 1879. There he benefited from the innovative instruction oriented towards studio practice and technique while connecting with several future members of the avant-garde Les XX (1884-1893). Lemmen’s early artistic endeavors were influenced by the Belgian symbolists Fernand Khnopff and James Ensor and from 1888 on, Lemmen joined Les XX. That year, Georges Seurat's Sunday Afternoon at the Grande Jatte was exhibited, turning Lemmen on to pointillism, eventually developing his own version that consisted of looser swirls of color. From 1889 to 1893, Lemmen participated in the Salon des Indépendants in Paris. By 1894, he abandoned Divisionism and turned to the Arts and Crafts movement's William Morris and Walter Crane and frequented Henry van de Velde, who was exploring similar avenues.

From 1900 on, Lemmen renewed his artistic practice yet again, focusing on intimist subjects such as his own family, inner circle and still lifes. Close in spirit to the French Nabis artists Éduourd Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, his work was now above all characterized by pictorial media handled in small brushstrokes, simplified contours and modeling, and compressed space as in a tapestry. On the occasion of the Lemmen’s first solo exhibition in 1906, Octave Maus wrote: "Mr. Lemmen should be classified with the ‘Intimists.’ He belongs to Vuillard’s and Bonnard’s spiritual family,”.1 Maus, Les XX founder and influential Belgian art critic, was one of Lemmen’s first supporters and counted among his most loyal friends.

1 Exhibition review Galerie Druet, L'Art moderne, 26, 1906, pp. 389-390

The sitter in the present portrait certainly belonged to the artist's charmed circle: Lina, spouse of prominent art critic and early Khnopff promotor Louis Dumont-Wilden (1875-1963). Lina Wilden, was a young French girl, who married Dumont in 1898, after which he adopted her name. Was Lemmen commissioned to portray the other half of this Belgian symbolism influencer or was she just a willing model? A small watercolor, dated 1910, depicting Mmes. Lemmen and Dumont- Wilden and their children in the dunes at St. Idesbald and another watercolor depicting the two missuses from 1910 indicate that there were strong family ties between the two families.

Georges Lemmen St Idesbald, 1er avril 1910, 1910 Ink and watercolor on paper, 23.35 x 32.5 cm. Present whereabouts unknown