Portrait of Marguerite van Mons

Théo van Rysselberghe was the most important Belgian Neo-Impressionist, who adopted Seurat's Pointillist technique in the mid-1880s and applied it with particular elegance to portraiture and the figure. His 1886 Portrait of Marguerite van Mons belongs to the very beginning of his Pointillist period, when he was translating the new method into the Belgian social world of his bourgeois sitters. Van Rysselberghe was a central figure in the Belgian avant-garde group Les XX, and his scientific approach to color — based on the optical mixing of pure chromatic dots — represented a disciplined theoretical program that distinguished him from the more intuitive French Impressionists.

The portrait demonstrates Rysselberghe's meticulous Pointillist application — the surface built from carefully placed touches of pure color that optically blend at the viewer's distance. The technique gives the sitter's skin a particular luminous quality, with complementary colors placed side by side to create vibrancy in the flesh tones.