Vrouw met baret 1920

This is Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita's "Vrouw met baret," a work of graphic media on paper, housed at the Rijksmuseum. Mesquita, a Jewish artist working in the Netherlands, tragically perished in the Holocaust. In this piece, we encounter a woman wearing a beret, her gaze cast downwards. The work exists within the context of early 20th-century portraiture, yet it also seems to subtly question the conventional modes of representation. What does it mean to portray a woman not as a symbol of beauty, but as an individual caught in a moment of introspection? The beret itself has complex associations, often worn as a signifier of artistic identity, of bohemianism, or of a certain kind of intellectual aspiration. Mesquita’s personal history as a Jewish man living through a period of rising antisemitism adds another layer to this piece, a reminder of the precarity of identity, and the weight of history bearing down on the individual. This piece is a quiet testament to the intimate and personal amidst the tumult of the times.