"This portrait of Alice, the grandmother of Anne Frank, truly fascinates me. I first saw it in the living room of Gerti Elias’ Basel home, from which the items of the Frank and Elias family inheritances, displayed today in our permanent exhibition, originate. In 1868, as the then three-year-old girl was portrayed in a smart dress holding a book in her hand, being a child was obviously a serious matter. In this painting full of pictorial quotations, Alice looks at us simultaneously as a child and as an adult, as it were since time immemorial.”