Portret van een onbekende vrouw before 1901

This is Joseph Turner Keiley’s small portrait of an unknown woman in tones of brown and cream. I can imagine him developing the photograph in a dark room – that otherworldly space so beloved of artists where the image emerges from the chemical bath like a half-formed memory. I love her downward glance and slightly parted lips. She looks resigned, a little sad, or is that my own melancholy I see in her eyes? The soft focus gives her an air of mystery. I can imagine Keiley wanting to capture her elusive inner life in that single moment. The way her hair falls is quite pre-Raphaelite. She feels like one of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s doomed beauties. For Keiley, as for other painters, I think there’s a desire to represent what we feel it means to be human and alive. We keep exchanging these feelings, these ideas across time, inspiring each other's creativity.