Théodore Chassériau
Santa Bárbara de Samaná, Dominican Republic, 1819 – Paris 1856
Young Woman Weeping at a Stela,
1840
Oil on canvas
61.2 x 50.1 cm
Purchase, the Museum Campaign 1988-1993 Fund, inv. 2010.42
Western Art
Théodore Chassériau was an astonishingly precocious artist whose talent and enthusiasm earned him admission, at the age of eleven, to the prestigious studio of Ingres. In this painting, a young girl modestly hides her tears, while the glorious blond hair rippling down over her classical attire suggests her beauty. In a light that could be dawn or sunset, the sun casts a reddish glow through the knotty trunks of olive trees wreathed in ivy, the symbol of eternal fidelity. Neither a pensive Melancholy nor a veiled mourner – two types that were coming back into fashion as the century neared its end – this is, rather, a figure of Grief. Chassériau’s increasingly sensual, dazzling Romanticism would bring him great fame before he succumbed to illness at the age of only thirty-seven.
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