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Dimensions: 17.5 by 19cm., 7 by 7½in.
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Provenance: Marguerite Freson-Khnopff, Liège (the artist's sister)
Gilberte Thibaut de Maisières, Seneffe (daughter of the above)
The Piccadilly Gallery, London
Galerie J.C. Gaubert, Paris
Wolf Uecker, Lausanne
Purchased by the present owner in the 1980s
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Exhibited: Paris, Galerie J.C. Gaubert, Idéalistes et Symbolistes, no. 36, illustrated in the catalogue
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Literature: Robert Delevoy, Catherine de Croës & Gisèle Ollinger-Zinque, Fernand Khnopff, Catalogue de l'oeuvre, Brussels, 1987, pp. 365-366, no. 472, illustrated
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Notes: PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE FRENCH COLLECTOR
Executed circa 1910, the present work is part of a series of cropped female faces shown frontally.
'Faces dominate the art of Fernand Khnopff; they become the expressive hieroglyphs which invite the viewer to engage in a dialogue, to be swept up out of the world for a time into the eternal world of aesthetic contemplation.' (Jeffrey Howe, Introduction to the exhibition catalogue Fernand Khnopff and the Belgian avant-garde, Chicago, New York & Delaware, 1984).
Emile Verhaeren described Khnopff's drawings as 'suggestions of thought'. In this context the image of the woman in the present work can be considered purely symbolic - the incarnation of human passions and ideas.
