In this meta self-portrait, a study for an etching depicting the artist in front of a printing press, the seventy-three-year-old Engelien Reitsma-Valença captures herself in the act of drawing the very image we see. Holding her sheet aloft, she seems to gaze out at the viewer with visible concentration, though of course in reality Reitsma-Valença would be carefully scrutinising her own likeness in a mirror. Into her eighth decade, the artist has lost none of the precision or surety of touch that won her the Prix de Rome over half a century before.

By descent in the family of the artist, until 2024.