Portrait of My Mother (1900).
Oil on canvas.
Musée d'Art et d'Histoire de Genève.
While this work of her mother reading was more traditional, Bailly was known for her interpretations on cubism, fauvism, her wool paintings, and her participation in the Dada movement.
In 1906, Bailly had settled in Paris where she befriended Juan Gris, Francis Picabia, and Marie Laurencin, avant-garde modernist painters who influenced her works and her later life.
Élisabeth Louise Vigée-LeBrun (French, 1755-1842).
Oil on canvas.
NMWA.
Vigée-LeBrun portrays the Russian princess as beautiful and approachable.
She wears a faint smile on her moist lips, her curly hair is attractively tousled, and her two-tone shawl and matching fringed headwrap add warmth to her coloring and the portrait as a whole.
The artist has downplayed the luxury of her sitters life. The princess wears a simple, long-sleeved, high-waisted dress.
The sitter holds a prayer book, echoing Bouguereaus love for Raphael and his preference for a secular interpretation of a traditionally overt religious theme.
Books of Hours were illustrated prayer books, and from the medieval era onward, were commissioned by wealthy patrons for daily devotional use.
Bouguereau has taken this most traditional subject matter and made it his own, dressing his model in the clothing of a Romanticized Italian peasant.
Vernon Lee was the pseudonym of the author and essayist born Violet Paget, and her story is one of unrequited love.
This portrait, by her lifelong friend John Singer Sargent, captures something of her intentional gender ambiguity: Lee wrote of her chosen name that it has the advantage of leaving it undecided whether the writer be a man or a woman.
