Antique Belgian Pastel Portrait of a Woman, Signed and Dated 1892

The Piece

A portrait in pastel of a young woman, shown in three quarter profile turned to the left, the head and shoulders set within a painted oval on a rectangular sheet. She has dark hair dressed back and up from the forehead with the natural curl left in it, level brows, grey blue eyes, and a long straight nose. The mouth is slightly parted. She wears a loose gown in cream and pale blue green with a wide open neckline falling off the shoulder, worked in broad soft strokes that stand in deliberate contrast to the tightly finished head.

The background is an interior rather than a studio void, and it repays looking at. Behind her the artist has indicated a wall with a framed picture hung on it and, above, a rail or ledge carrying hooks, all drawn lightly in line and laid in with thin colour, so that the sitter appears to be at work or at rest in a real room. The palette across the whole sheet is restrained: warm flesh tones against greys, sage greens and chalky blues, with the strongest colour reserved for the mouth and the flush of the cheek.

The handling is confident and economical. The face is built with the side of the stick and then drawn into with a sharpened point at the eyelid, the nostril and the corner of the mouth; the drapery is left almost untouched. This is the work of somebody who could draw.

The sheet is signed and dated in the lower right, within the image. The date reads 1892 and is entirely clear, preceded by what appears to be a month. The name itself is written small and lightly in a hard pencil over a pale passage of pastel and is not legible in the photography available.

The work is in a period gilt composition frame with an outer band of running foliate scroll over a bead and reel, an inner gilt slip, and a gilt washed mount cut to the oval. The glazing is in place.

History & Provenance

The back carries two pieces of evidence, and together they are worth more than most signatures.

The first is a printed trade label applied to the backing board. It reads Maison Adele Deswarte, 28 rue de la Violette 28, Bruxelles, Jules Leurquin, Successeur, Fabrique de Couleurs en Tubes et en Poudre, and goes on to list prepared canvases, panels, cottons, boards and papers for oil, pastel and watercolour, together with artistic joinery: boxes, easels and stretchers with and without keys.

Adele Deswarte is a name that matters in Belgian art. Her business on the rue de la Violette was the colourman and artists' supplier at the centre of progressive Brussels painting in the later nineteenth century, the shop that served the generation around Les XX, and she was closely enough involved in that world to have sponsored and published exhibition catalogues for it. A Deswarte label on the back of a picture is a Brussels address in the fullest sense.

The label also dates itself. In 1883 the business was stamping work as Comptoir des Arts, Adele Deswarte, at number 18 rue de la Violette, under her own name alone. This label is at number 28 and names Jules Leurquin as her successor. Both the move and the succession therefore postdate 1883, which places the label comfortably before the 1892 date on the front and confirms that the support was bought in Brussels shortly before the portrait was drawn.

The second piece of evidence is written by hand in pencil along the backing paper at the top: MARGUERITE RENOZ HAGEMAN, with further faint writing to the right. Renoz and Hageman are both Belgian surnames, and the inscription reads as the sitter's name recorded by whoever framed or kept the picture. Very few nineteenth century portraits of private sitters come with a name at all.

What the picture does not yet have is an artist. The signature is present but unresolved, and Viridian Eclection is not going to invent one. What can be said is documented: a pastel portrait, drawn in September 1892 on a support bought from the leading Brussels artists' supplier, of a named Belgian sitter, by a hand that plainly had training.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A good portrait fixes a room the way nothing else does, and this one has the quality that matters most, which is that the sitter is present rather than posed. She is looking at something outside the picture and is about to speak, and that holds a wall. The palette is soft enough to hang almost anywhere, against limewash, against a deep green, over a mantel or at the turn of a stair, and the oval within the rectangle gives it a formality the loose handling then undercuts.

It is also that rarer thing, a decorative picture that is genuinely documented. It is dated to a month in 1892, the support can be traced to a named Brussels shop with a real place in Belgian art history, and the sitter has a name. Most nineteenth century portraits on the market have none of that.