Portret van een meisje, naar links before 1884

Gerard Jan Bos created this etching of a girl, looking down and to the left, sometime around the turn of the twentieth century. It’s a study in contrasts. A detailed face is set against a dark, undefined background. Bos worked in the Netherlands, a country with a long tradition of genre paintings and portraiture depicting the everyday lives of its citizens. This simple portrait is interesting because of the way the Dutch art world was institutionalized at the time. Though art academies flourished, so did independent art societies. Artists organized themselves into groups that often challenged the established academic style. Bos was a member of several of these societies, including the Federation of Visual Artists Associations. The image speaks to the time in which it was made because of its naturalistic depiction of the young girl. It’s informal, not posed, and perhaps indicative of Bos’s alignment with those independent associations and their desire to represent the world as they saw it. By researching the archives of these artists’ societies, and by delving into the history of Dutch art academies, we can gain a clearer understanding of the context in which Bos made this print.