Elegant Woman with Birds
Artist
Louis Anquetin
(French, 1861–1932)
Date1890
Mediumpastel on paper
Dimensions60.3 × 48.9 cm (23 3/4 × 19 1/4 in.)
ClassificationsPastels
Credit LineStoddard Acquisition Fund
Terms
Object number2013.28
Label TextIn 1888, a French critic celebrated Louis Anquetin as the inventor of a new painterly method, the cloisonnisme, whereby colors and forms are compartmentalized by dark contour lines. The artist supposedly came to his breakthrough by looking through a stained glass window at his parent's house in Normandy: green glass imitated the light of a full moon, yellow accentuated the radiant power of the sun, and blue gave the impression of snow.
Anquetin clearly viewed this portrait through a blue filter. Pale, with lifeless lips, dead birds on her hat, and the skin of dead animals around her neck and body, the woman looks like a modern allegory of winter. The only traces of passing life can be detected in the color of her ear and some streaks of ginger in hair.
This pastel was created towards the end of a short but highly productive period in Anquetin’s artistic career, when friends like Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) avidly copied his work and others, like Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), found inspiration to leave the Impressionist realm behind them. Yet while everyone today knows about his friends, Anquetin faded into oblivion as he became an archconservative obsessed with resurrecting Old Master painting techniques.
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