This portrait of Mathilde Visser is a particularly successful watercolour by the artist Constant. Mathilde Visser was a prominent and controversial art critic in the eighties. Constant met her for the last time on her sixty-fifth birthday. Shortly thereafter, Mathilde died. Constant therefore created this watercolour posthumously from memory. From a chaos of dark and light smudges, he painted this striking portrait. This spectacle of smudges in flaming colours typifies the strong character of Mathilde Visser. Constant Nieuwenhuijs only used his Christian name, and was co-founder of the Cobra movement in 1948. Cobra was an artistic group that was highly innovative and experimental. As an artist, Constant is especially well known for his later work “New Babylon”, an idealistic design of the city of the future. He worked out his ideas using among other things, scale models, maps, paintings and films. The Hague's Gemeentemuseum is the custodian of most of this project.