Matinee de printemps
James Jacques Joseph Tissot
Description
Subject Matter:
This genre scene, or image of everyday life, centers on the depiction of a fashoinable bourgeois woman caught during a sudden shift in the pleasant spring morning weather.
The image can be placed within a long visual tradition of deocrative allegorical images in which women are used to represent the four seasons. In a related allegorical reading, contemporaries might have seen the change in the weather depicted in the print as analogous to the supposed quickness with which women's moods were thought to shift.
Physical Description:
A woman in an elaborate striped dress stands in an outdoor landscape, shading her eyes with her right hand and looking directly out at the viewer. She holds a white umbrella that dramatically frames her head (capped by a white hat) against the dark sky in the upper background of the composition. A contrasting white area of ground beneath the black sky leads into the foreground, where the woman stands at the edge of a pond surrounded by reeds and a large stalked plant.
Signed in the image, lower left, in the plate: "J.J. Tissot / 1875"
Usage Rights:
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