Fernand Khnopff: Portrait of Jeanne Kéfer

The Belgian artist, illustrator, sculptor, and photographer Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921) became a popular society portraitist in the 1880s, using elements that had served him well as an avant-garde symbolist painter: visual realism and a mood of silence, isolation, and reverie. As in the provocative yet hauntingly beautiful Portrait of Jeanne Kéfer, which is the focus of this book, he frequently posed his models leaning against a closed door, flattening the space and resulting in a meditative,…