Portrait of a Woman, ca. 1880

The artist Liévin De Winne, who was born in Ghent, rose to fame as a painter of portraits of the upper middle class, the nobility and the Belgian court. In the course of his career he moved from a meticulous style of drawing to less focused settings, with a preference for warm colours and gentle contrasts between light and dark. In this unfinished portrait of an unknown woman, De Winne rendered the head very realistically. He introduced an air of kind-heartedness into his psychological characterisation of this woman. In combination with the refined treatment of the face, in the woman’s clothing De Winne applied a looser, more evocative touch that relates to the indeterminate background.