The lives of Geesje and Anna Kwak, the famous but little-known “Kimono models” created by painter Breitner

When I saw the news of the Breitner exhibition at the Laren Singer Museum, I thought lazily, This is going to happen. You don’t have to go abroad to see Breitner. In short, I left it alone. Like the book Jenny Reynaerts wrote about Breitner’s favorite models. Gis and Anna, a pair of petite Amsterdam girls, almost drowned in those incredible kimonos. Lying on the sofa, standing in front of the mirror.

Something familiar, I thought. Then I read the book, and everything changed. Reinaerts travels with angelic steps through a world that has largely vanished, after all, who would bother to record what happened to those petite Kuo girls back then? In addition to Guille and Anna, whom Reinaerts carefully identifies in the red, white and black embroidered silks, there are two sisters, Nielle and Affi. They all have the stature and special look that Breitner captures so beautifully in his paintings.

One of the surprising facts of life you learn from Reynaert’s book is how easy it was for the poor to move in 1890. The Goethe family moved from house to house in the new 19th-century buildings that were rapidly rising in Amsterdam-Oost and De Piep. Some of these houses are still standing, but most have now disappeared or been converted into apartments with roof gardens that you now have to pay a fortune to buy.

Maybe all this moving around was normal, maybe it was a family trait. Regardless, the sisters themselves were as adventurous as young girls today, which is surprising considering the obstacles they had to face. Geesje, Niesje, and later Aafje went to South Africa, while Anna immigrated to San Francisco with her husband and adopted daughter.

Syphilis and tuberculosis

The price they pay for their entrepreneurial spirit is high, transporting you right back to that miserable mid-nineteenth century, when diseases like syphilis and tuberculosis were rampant and young women had no control over their lives anyway.

Thanks to the contact with descendants and especially the rare creative and tenacious research, Reinartz was able to reconstruct the fate of the Kuo sisters. She knew less about Jijie than she would have liked. Her image appears in the book as a silhouette of all the circumstances that determined her short life. Completed by the photographs, the beautiful girl comes to us very alive, sometimes happy, often serious, just as one would have seen her in the photographs at the time.

Three of the kimono paintings now hang in the Singer Museum, beautifully arranged in a row. One white, one red, one black. I looked at them anyway with my newly opened eyes. What a great painter he was. All of Amsterdam in 1900, gas-lit, unhealthy Amsterdam comes at you in Laren, full of horses, posters, ladies and maids who earn extra money by posing for artists like Breitner. Who save this money to pay for long journeys in search of a better life. You think you know everything, but you still know nothing.

Jenny Reinartz, Geesje & Anna, the world of Breitner supermodelsAmsterdam 2024. Expo: Singer, Laren, Breitner t/m September 8

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