Georges Lemmen adopted the pointillist style after seeing George Seurat’s Sunday on the Island of la Grande Jatte, the monumental Pointillist scene that indelibly impacted the course of modern art, at an exhibition in Brussels in 1887.



The present work was exhibited in a show put together by the progressive Belgian artistic circle Les XX the year it was painted, and later at the Galerie Maurice in Paris, where it was illustrated on the cover of the exhibition catalogue.



In this portrait of his sister Julie sewing, Lemmen combines a meticulous pointillist technique with an intimiste sensibility reminiscent of Dutch 17th century genre paintings.