Signed and dated lower right: Clement Serneels / Goma 1939

Oil on panel

46.7 x 38.5 cm. (18 ½ x 15 ¼ in.)

Serneels, born in Brussels in 1910, was the son of a Belgian architect. He first visited the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi in 1936-37, though there was initial resistance from the Belgian minister of the Colonies due to the expensive nature of such travels. However, he was eventually granted the necessary finances thanks to the support of Alfred Bastien, the director of the Académie de Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, where Serneels was one of his most brilliant students. Thanks to the success of the first trip, with a sell-out exhibition on his return to Belgium, Serneels travelled back to Central Africa in 1938, this time using his own resources. When World War II broke out, the artist stayed on in Bukava (at the time called Costermansville), on the south-west shores of Lake Kivu in the Belgian Congo.

The present work was painted in Goma, an important urban centre on the northern edge of Lake Kivu, just under two hundred kilometres north of Bukavu. As this and several other works attest, Serneels travelled quite widely in the area around Lake Kivu, with the artist also visiting Kigali, in Rwanda, in 1939. Though Serneels’ working methods are not definitively known, a large part of his output from this time consists of portraits of those he met on his travels. 

From extant works, 1939 seems to have been a particularly successful year for Serneels, with many of his finest portraits dating from this time. Like the best of these works, the present painting, depicting a woman wearing a red headscarf, is painted with bravura and intensity, with the face, the focal area of the composition, executed with dynamic and liquid brushstrokes.