The Gathering in a Park

 Watteau: L'Assemblée dans un parc, oil on wood, 1716-17, Musée du Louvre. 

Image source: WGA

Last February, we went to the island of Ruegen on the weekend of a great storm. The Baltic raged for a day and a night, trees were torn out of the cliffs, and firefighters in the state of Mecklenburg Vorpommern.were called out two hundred times. Next morning, the coast looked innocent, as if no violence had been committed, its pale sand beaches, white rock, and calm grey sea as pure as in Friedrich’s view of the chalk cliffs, jagged as canines, guarding the inverted triangle of water beyond.

detail of Caspar David Friedrich's Chalk Cliffs on Ruegen

One day, a few weeks after our trip, I caught up with myself, nine months in, a full term in which....

known unknowns

Part Seven of Among Tigers and Panthers

"MARIE-DENISE VILLERS"

by herself

OWNING HER IDENTITY: Young Woman Drawing, oil on canvas, 1801. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

For a long time after this painting was bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum by a private collector in 1917, it was considered proficient enough to be the work of a male artist, even of the quintessence of neoclassicism, David, even though the gentle treatment and wistful mood, and the slight flat modelling of the face and slippered foot, are incompatible with the staged severity and anatomical precision of his recognized work. 

Art historians now usually attribute this painting to Marie-Denise Villers (1774-1821) and, gratifying our cut-and-dried need for names and labels, believe that it is a self-portrait. The sitter's identification, and whether she is sketching us or herself, does not detract from the imaginative suggestiveness of the picture, or of the picture within the picture, framed by the window pane, or of the unclouded certainty in her gaze. We are not really sure about anything, though we like to think power has been transferred from artist to spectator, and we are compelled to pontificate, blah and blog. But this half-forgotten painting defeats us. Knowledge belongs to the artist/model; she holds the source of reflected light illuminating her own face; through the image she has selected to show us, she is in control of her story....