Bourgeois Interior

Prints and Drawings

1890/91

Georges Lemmen
Belgian, 1865-1916

This important study for a lost painting of the same name made its debut at the annual exhibition of the Belgian avant-garde society Les XX (The Twenty) in 1891. Georges Seurat had shown A Sunday on La Grand Jatte (1884/86; in the Art Institute’s collection) there just four years before. The most ambitious of Lemmen’s first Neo-Impressionist works, the composition depicts his sister, mother, and grandmother.

Status: Currently Off View
Department: Prints and Drawings

Artist: Georges Lemmen
Title: Bourgeois Interior
Place: Belgium (Artist's nationality:)
Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.: 1890–1891
Medium: Charcoal, with stumping and black Conté crayon, with touches of white gouache, on cream laid paper, fixed
Inscriptions: Inscribed verso, in graphite (most probably by Octave Maus): "Georges Lemmen/No. 5 Etude pour le No.1"
Dimensions: 47 × 59.3 cm (18 9/16 × 23 3/8 in.)
Credit Line: Suzanne and Marjorie Pochter and Print and Drawing Funds
Reference Number: 2015.218
IIIF Manifest The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world. Learn more.: https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/229007/manifest.json

“Aux XX,” L’Art Moderne 16, 25 (Apr. 19, 1891), p. 128.
Neffe-Degandt Fine Art, Selected Paintings and Works on Paper (Neffe-Degandt Fine Art, 2007), pp. 80–81.

Brussels, Les XX, Feb. 1891, cat. 5.
Paris, Salon des Indépendants, 1891, cat. 757.
Art Institute of Chicago, “Chicago Collectors,” Sept. 20–Oct. 27, 1963, p. 6.
Indianapolis Museum of Art, “The Neo-Impressionist Portrait 1886-1904,” June 15–Sept. 7, 2014, pl. 14, p. 97; also Brussels, ING Cultural Centre, Feb. 19–May 18, 2014.
Art Institute of Chicago, “Master Drawings Unveiled: 25 Years of Major Acquisitions,” Aug. 27, 2016–Jan. 29, 2017, no cat.

Sold by the artist to Édouard Kohn (1825–1895), Paris, 1891 [Indianapolis 2014]. Kunsthandlung Gauss, Munich. Allan Frumkin (1926–2002), Chicago, probably by 1963 [Chicago 1963]; by descent to his wife, Jean, New York, from 2002. Jill Newhouse, New York, 2007. Art Research, Feldmeilen, Switzerland. Private collection, Belgium, by 2014; sold by Eric Gillis, Brussels, to the Art Institute of Chicago, 2015.

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