Portrait of Mme ***

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Portrait of Mme *** (Madame Durant) (Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran)
Portrait of Mme *** (Madame Durant)
Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran , 1869
Oil on canvas
228 × 164 cm
Musée d'Orsay

Portrait of Mme *** (Madame Durant) , also known as The Lady with the Glove , is a portrait paintedby Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran . The portrait, created in 1869, is 228 centimeters high and 164 centimeters wide and waspaintedwith oil on canvas . The sitter is the painter's wife, Pauline Carolus-Duran . The portrait wassubmittedto the Salon de Paris in 1869 and earned the artist good reviews, audience approval and a medal. The portrait of Mme *** is now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris .

Image description

The picture Portrait of Mme *** is dominated by black and gray tones. Pauline Carolus-Duran wears a black silk dress in front of a gray wall that is horizontally divided by a bar halfway up, so that the lower part of the wall is darker than the upper part. There are no objects in the room that could distract from the figure. The dress is a model suitable for going out or receiving visitors and is decorated with lace . The sitter wears a corset and over it a figure-hugging top, which is provided with ribbon and lace trim on the sleeve insert seam. The skirt is dragging and has a buttock bow. Accents are the red rose as a breast ornament, the white cuffs , the earrings and the cap- like headgear with lace and a yellow rose. The lace trim loosens the harsh contours of the picture and is continued in the border , which can be seen particularly clearly in the middle of the wall to the right of the sitter, and the golden decorative strip.

The person portrayed wears gloves made of ice-cream or suede , which she removes when she is captured. One of them has already fallen to the ground. So there is a little plot in the picture. In addition, this flirtatious gesture contrasts with the serious clothing of the woman. The portrait is in the lower left corner of the picture with Carolus Duran. 1869. signed.

role models

In the portrait of Mme *** , Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran processed impressions of a trip to Spain in 1866 and 1867. He saw works by Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez , which he held in high esteem. Based on this, Carolus-Duran chose the composition with the figure dressed in black against a gray background. This is also given, for example, in the painting Young man in the costume of a majo by Édouard Manet , who was also enthusiastic about Spain and with whom Carolus-Duran was friends. Another model was the portrait of Camille in a green dress by Claude Monet . Carolus-Duran saw this picture at the Salon de Paris in 1866 when he himself presented the painting The Murdered: Memory of the Roman Campagna , and he also got to know Monet personally. In the Camille some elements of the portrait of Mme *** are given. Claude Monet concentrated on the depiction of a woman in a noble dress, whose train is cut off from the edge of the picture, against a calm background and without distracting objects. Movement is also indicated in Monet's picture by pausing briefly and then turning to the right. In Carolus-Duran's painting, when the gloves are taken off, there is a calmer movement and the sitter's face is turned directly towards the viewer. Compared to Monet's Camille , for whom the dress is clearly in the center of the picture, the portrait of Mme ***, as the name suggests, is clearly a portrait .

Classification in the work of Carolus-Duran and criticism

Carolus-Duran was not one of the representatives of the academic painting that dominated the salon, but after his relocation to Paris in 1855 first oriented himself towards Gustave Courbet . In 1857 he also got to know the circle of artists that had formed around Édouard Manet , Alphonse Legros and Henri Fantin-Latour . Later, he was also on friendly terms with Manet. In 1876 he painted a full-length portrait of Carolus-Duran and Carolus-Duran in return a half-length portrait of Manet.

In contrast to Manet and other avant-garde artists, who in some cases left large sketchy sections in their pictures and thus provoked criticism, Carolus-Duran chose a middle ground between avant-garde and convention . The portrait of Mme *** is the first full-length portrait in Carolus-Duran's oeuvre. With the elaboration of the face and hands and the dress, which in the painting style resembles that of Monet's Camille in the green dress , he found himself closer to the taste of the audience. Accordingly, the criticism was largely positive. However, there were also critical voices such as that of the critic Jules Castagnary , who lacked “depth” in the picture and perceived it as an “external portrait, superficial, so to speak”. Berthe Morisot described the picture as “... pretty vulgar. It's not absolutely bad, but I think it's mannered and flat. ”The success that Carolus-Duran had with the portrait of Mme *** with salon audiences, the art critics and the salon itself with winning the medal marked one Turning point in his work. Before that he mainly painted history pictures and genre scenes , now many portraits of society followed.

Provenance

The painting Portrait of Mme *** was acquired directly from the artist by the French state in 1875. This purchase was made for the Musée du Luxembourg . In 1929 the picture was given to the Louvre . In 1982 the portrait of Mme *** finally came into the collection of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris , where it is still to this day.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Dorothee Hansen and Wulf Herzogenrath (eds.): Monet and Camille. Portraits of Women in Impressionism , page 111.
  2. ↑ Dorothee Hansen and Wulf Herzogenrath (eds.): Monet and Camille. Portraits of Women in Impressionism , page 191.

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