The Reader

A Young Girl Reading, 1770-1772
Jean-Honore Fragonard
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Image: wikimedia commons

I apologize for such a weak week in art of the day blurbing, I have been preparing for the conference I am headed to this afternoon. I set out looking for a Fragonard painting and via wikipedia discovered something I am surprised I hadn't yet. I've had a small print of this painting that I love for a number of years. I never took the time to figure out who the painting was by and am very happy it is Fragonard. Fragonard was part of my study into Rococo painting for my thesis. Oh how I love domesticity, frivolity and playfulness!

So, since it is art, a painting I love and of a lady reading it seems pretty fitting to sign off with it on my way to the ARLIS (Art Libraries Society) conference, to hang with art librarians. woo! Indianapolis here I come!

Enjoy the sweetness, the curved ring finger, the golden dress. I'll try to post while I am away but if I don't get the chance I'll be back on Tuesday!

Reading

Woman Reading, ca.1876, cast 1902
Aime-Jules Dalou (1838-1902)
Musee d'Orsay
H. 56.1; W. 43.9; D. 35.3 cm

This little gem was discovered on one of my weekly walks through one of the museum's galleries (I try to go once a week during lunch and spend time with things I've neglected up until now). I never noticed the piece before and adore the beauty and simplicity of the sculpture, and it doesn't hurt that the subject is a woman reading. This particular image comes from the collection of the Musee d'Orsay, as a number of statuettes were most cast from the original model, in various materials, stoneware, porcelain and bronze.

This particular statuette stems from an original model, Femme nue lisant dans un fauteuil
(Nude Woman Reading in an Armchair). This is my first foray into the work of Jules Dalou as a I rack up the areas of omission in my art historical brain (with the plethora of art history, that shall always be the case, happily!). My late 19th c. knowledge of sculptors is horribly limited to Rodin and it turns out Dalou was considered his rival for France's greatest sculptor! (as I read more, bits of memory float back so I am pretty sure he may have crossed my radar in the past but apparently did not stick!) "Dalou played a major role in French cultural life by providing influential alternatives to the Academy and the Salon as arbiters of modern art. He was a founding member of the Société des Artistes Français and later a founder of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts." (NGA bio)

Dalou had a strong belief in political and social equality, and is known for his statues of workers, in addition to grand-scale public works in Paris. Despite this, his domestic, more intimate realistic sculptures of women actually inaugurated the genre at the Salon in 1870 as the move beyond Academic Art (idealization of the human figure in this case) continued.