Portrait of Hendrika Troussard-Maris, sister of the painter

Matthijs Maris, the most poetic and mystical of the three Maris brothers who defined Dutch painting in the late 19th century, painted this portrait of his sister Hendrika Troussard-Maris in 1872. Matthijs was a dreamer whose art moved steadily away from observable reality toward a misty, romantic world of imagination, eventually leaving the Netherlands for London where his work grew increasingly unworldly. A portrait of his own sister represents a personal subject close to the intimate, inward quality of his temperament. The Kröller-Müller Museum, renowned for its collection of late 19th-century Dutch art, holds this work.

Matthijs Maris renders his sister with the soft, slightly blurred quality that distinguishes his portraiture from the harder-edged work of his brother Jacob. The paint surface has a quiet luminosity, with the face emerging gently from a subdued background.