Friday, December 7, 2018

Female Beauty (through male eyes, as preserved at the Met)

Philippe de Champaigne
Portrait of Charlotte Duchesne
ca. 1628
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

"Although the inscription likely postdates the artist's lifetime, there is no reason to doubt that this sheet is a portrait drawn from life of Philippe de Champaigne's wife, Charlotte Duchesne, daughter of the painter Nicolas Duchesne, who had hired the young Flemish-born artist to assist in the decoration of the Luxembourg Palace for Marie de' Medici shortly after her arrival in Paris.  It is a study for the bust-length oil painting in the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, which, before the Metropolitan's drawing came to light in 1992, had been thought to represent Henriette of France, wife of Charles I of England."

Wenceslaus Hollar
Young woman with wreath of oak leaves
1646
etching
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

attributed to Jacopo de' Barbari
Bust of a woman with her head turned to the left
ca. 1506
engraving
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Robert Le Lorrain
Bust of a young girl
ca. 1720
bronze
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Jean-Pierre Dantan the younger
Bust of a young woman
1836
marble
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

"Dantan mixed Neoclassical training with interests in caricature, phrenology, and fashionable society.  Today he is best known as a caricaturist, although straightforward portraits comprise at least half of his output.  Occasional they may have a mischievous undertone, but this young woman has an appreciable semblance of wit and sparkle even as she flaunts the latest hairstyle dubbed à la Hortense Mancini."

Larkin Goldsmith Mead
Venezia
ca. 1865-66
marble
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

"Vermont-born Larkin Goldsmith Mead was a prominent expatriate sculptor who worked in Florence for more than half a century.  During the mid-1860s he made frequent trips to Venice, where his brother-in-law William Dean Howells served as the American consul and where Mead met his future bride, Marietta di Benvenuti.   Venezia, his best-known sculpture (of which there are more than ten located examples), depicts an attractive young woman, probably the sculptor's wife at the time of their courtship and marriage.  As a personification of Venice, she wears a tiara of beads and a central scallop shell upon which is set a small gondola.  The figure emerges from a textured sea-foam bodice – particularly finely carved in this marble – that serves not only as the bust's termination but also as a reference to Venice's aqueous environment." 

Henri-Baron de Triqueti
Portrait of a young woman
1850
marble
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

"Triqueti was one of the most sophisticated sculptors of his day.  He knew the Elgin marbles, collected Géricault, and catalogued Bonington.  His early grounding in ornamental sculpture is still manifest in this work from the middle of his career, as is his talent for portraiture – comparisons with the swan-necked beauties of Ingres come readily to mind.  Triqueti received several coveted commissions: the bronze doors of the Madeleine in Paris, completed in 1837, the marble effigy of the widely lamented duc d'Orleans at Neuilly, completed in 1843, and the marble cenotaph of Prince Albert in the Wolsey Chapel at Windsor, begun in 1864.  The subject of the relief may be his wife, an Englishwoman whom he wed in 1847.  He reinvented this type of portrait medallion, the imago clipeata, from Greco-Roman antiquity, while giving it his own abstract interplay of concaves and convexes." 

Auguste Rodin
Mask of Rose Beuret
ca. 1880-98
plaster
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

"This is a cast of the final portrait Rodin made of Rose Beuret, one of his first models and his companion of fifty-three years.  An uneducated woman from the countryside, she maintained Rodin's studio in their youthful poverty, bore his son, and served him throughout her life.  Here, Rodin captures their enigmatic relationship by modeling her face as a mask with downcast eyes."

Ancient Rome
Portrait of a young girl
AD 81-96
marble
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Ancient Rome
Head of a young woman
1st century BC - 1st century AD
marble
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Ancient Greece
Head of a young woman, from a funerary statue
late 4th century BC
marble
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Umberto Boccioni
Young woman reading (Ines)
1909-1910
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Abbott H. Thayer
Young Woman
ca. 1898
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

"Thayer frequently painted idealized women, a popular subject in late nineteenth-century art.  The model for this painting was Bessie Price (1879-1968), an Irish immigrant who worked as a servant in the Thayer household and soon became one of the artist's favorite models.  The figure is draped in classical style, recalling ancient Rome, yet she is also a "profoundly human presence," as the critic Royal Cortissoz wrote in 1923.  Young Woman received a gold medal at the 1900 Paris Exposition.  The work retains its original frame, which was inspired by the designs of the architect Stanford White."  

Clarence H. White
Portrait study of a young woman
1907
platinum print
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

– quoted texts from curator's notes at the Metropolitan Museum