On loan to The Met The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
The Three Sisters
Léon Frederic Belgian
In the 1890s Frederic’s paintings of impoverished workers and peasants in his native Belgium were celebrated for their forthrightness and arresting intensity. Here, the humdrum activity of peeling potatoes is vivified by the girls’ bright red dresses and gleaming red-gold and blond hair. Their downcast eyes and serene expressions recall representations of the young Virgin Mary in sixteenth-century Flemish art, which Frederic greatly admired. Nothing is known of the sitters beyond the painting’s title, which identifies them as sisters; the two eldest are so uncannily alike that they appear to be twins.
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