Portrait of a child

Van Rysselberghe painted this child portrait in 1884, five years before his formal conversion to divisionism, placing it in the Pre-Pointillist phase of his career when he was working in a more conventional academic realist style influenced by his training at the Ghent and Brussels academies. The work demonstrates his technical facility before the encounter with Seurat transformed his approach, and it allows for a revealing comparison with his later, divisionist portrait practice. By 1884 Van Rysselberghe was a founding member of the Brussels avant-garde group Les XX, but the radical aesthetic revolution associated with that group was still in the future. The child portrait subject connects to a long European tradition of childhood representation, and Van Rysselberghe approaches it with the careful observation of a painter trained in the academic study of the human face.

Pre-divisionist technique means Van Rysselberghe is working with blended brushstrokes and conventional tonal modelling, producing a smooth surface that contrasts sharply with his later pointillist work. Flesh tones are achieved through the traditional academic method of warm and cool modulation rather than optical mixture. The compositional approach is conventional and technically accomplished.