The wistful look on the sitter's face, the low-keyed colours and the timeless setting of this portrait relate it to other portraits in Khnopff's oeuvre such as Portrait of the Artist's Sister (1887, Collection Bernard Thibaut de Maisière,Brussels) and Portrait of Madame Rothmaler (1889, Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Venice). The insistence upon an almost monochromatic colour range and the absence of space in the portrait suggest that Khnopff had absorbed certain features of Whistler's portrait style displayed in such pictures as Arrangement in Black No. III (Lady Archibald Campbell) (1884, Philadelphia Museum of Art), exhibited at Les XX in 1888 (Whistler I). However, the studied distancing of the sitter from the spectator underlines the meditative, hermetically-sealed image frequently found in Khnopff's work (e.g. A Blue Wing, 1894. Collection Anne-Marie Gillion-Crowet, Brussels, and Silence, 1890, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels). Here he expressed his debt to the unattainable women of Rossetti and Burne-Jones and perhaps also reflects the Symbolist literary atmosphere of his friends such as Gregoire Le Roy and Emile Verhaeren. (M.A. Stevens, Exhibition catalogue, Post-Impressionism, Royal Academy, London 1979, p. 267)

There is a study of this work (Catalogue de l'oeuvre, no. 139) in a private collection, London.

The sitter is the present owners grandmother.