Portrait of Egbert Kuipers (1828-1892)

Portrait of Egbert Kuipers (1828-1892), painted around 1900 and now at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, is a posthumous portrait—Kuipers had died before the painting was made. Mondrian was painting the portrait of a member of the Dutch Reformed Church community of which Kuipers was likely a figure of some local standing, given the dates and the commission of a formal painted portrait. Posthumous portraits, typically made from photographs or earlier likenesses, were common commissions for families wishing to preserve the memory of a deceased relative. This work situates Mondrian within the tradition of Dutch portrait painting that he would largely abandon as he moved toward abstraction.

A posthumous portrait typically relies on photographic or earlier painted sources, giving the image a slightly reconstructed quality. Mondrian renders Kuipers with the formal conventions of Dutch bourgeois portraiture: direct gaze, dark clothing, controlled tonal modeling of the face.