The little marquise

In the 1860s and 1870s, Jacob Maris was still working to some extent within the academic tradition but was employing other styles alongside it. An example of this is Girl knitting on a balcony, Montmartre (1869), which is also in the collection of the Gemeentemuseum. In that painting, the girl is painted in careful detail, whereas the background is much sketchier in style and betrays the influence of the Barbizon painter Corot. Maris was alternating a traditional style inspired by the Old Masters of the seventeenth-century with the freer brushwork he had seen in the work of contemporary French painters like Corot and Daubigny. He was also starting to experiment with a more limited and tonal palette composed of shades of grey and brown, and to apply the paint more thickly with brush and palette knife. This trend is apparent in the painting shown here. The head and hands of the marquise are executed in fine brushwork, while her dress is brushed in more rapidly using broad, spontaneous strokes.

Source: M. van Heteren (ed.), Jacob Maris (1837-1899): Ik denk in mijn materie, Haarlem, Oss 2003.