"Girl in White Kimono" is one the best paintings of George Hendrik Breitner. Breitner made thirteen paintings of a girl in a kimono. She assumes different poses and the kimono often has a different colour. What catches the eye here is the embroidered, white silk kimono with red-trimmed sleeves and an orange sash. The dreamy girl is sixteenyear-old Geesje Kwak, a seamstress and one of Breitner’s regular models.

George Hendrik Breitner was a Dutch painter and photographer. An important figure in Amsterdam Impressionism, he is noted especially for his paintings of street scenes and harbours in a realistic style. He painted outside, and became interested in photography as a means of documenting street life and atmospheric effects – rainy weather in particular – as reference materials for his paintings.

A pupil of August Allebé , George Breitner was a painter of a declared Impressionist setting. His works, according to some historians, would have influenced both the painting of Vincent van Gogh and that of Piet Mondrian . He was a point of reference for the Dutch school as long as Impressionism represented contemporary art in the turn of the century.