There’s Got to be a Morning After
A tronie, a head study, an Allegory of Summer with its plums and draped blouse. That’s how Caesar van Everdingen’s seventeenth-century girl has often been read: erotic undertone folded into fruit and fabric. Her wide-brimmed hat, adjacent to costuming and masquerades, gave her a touch of theater and exaggeration. Even the basket spoke outward, its woven pattern pointing to far-flung Dutch colonial reach. Hung high on a wall, she was designed to command the gaze, presence itself.
PORTRAIT MODE. 2025. egg tempera on panel. 12 × 16 inches.
My version — Portrait Mode — simply posits her in the 1970s, with all the accoutrements, down to a discrete Quaalude — that shorthand for a decade’s self-medication, perhaps washed down with a Tab; you’d never know. The undertone shifts to presentation and positioning, as our anti-heroine’s make-up looks caked and her gaze somewhat glazed, a come-hithering in blue eye shadow in lieu of a bared shoulder. The basket’s exotic weave transmutes into domestic wallpaper and polyester print, and that tremendous hat is replaced by a late-stage Midwest beehive — a relic of suburban Rococo excess, hair stacked and sprayed as if ambition alone could hold it up.
Caesar van Everdingen, Young Woman in a Broad-Brimmed Hat, c. 1645–1650. Oil on canvas. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
And then there’s the smile: Mona Lisa-ambiguous, doubled back on itself. Leonardo’s portrait is itself a kind of tronie; mine repeats the trick, but she isn’t looking out at us — she’s consuming her own product, getting high off her own supply of vanity. She’s less allegory than quip, a bon mot in egg tempera, like icing on a bonbon. She’s locked in reflection — a female Narcissus, falling into a digital pool, a daffodil by another name.
Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa, c. 1503–1506. Oil on poplar panel. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Beneath it all runs a quiet pathos of paint-by-numbers gestalt — whether it’s the literal application of tempera in this painting, or the patterned application of her makeup, or the pressure to live up to what society arguably values most in young women: the ability to command a gaze.
Van Everdingen painted presence; mine is performance. His figure filled a chamber; mine fills a feed — glazed, staged, and scrolling through time.
Preorder prints now — hand-signed, limited edition, and numbered. See it in the show, or in your home. You can’t fall into the digital pool if it’s hanging on your wall.