Description
| Year: | Not securely dated |
| Original size: | 198 cm x 115 cm |
| Painting style: | Naive art (primitivism), post-impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located at: | Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France |
Portrait of Madame M. – a hand-painted reproduction
An upright full-length portrait filling the centre. A woman stands facing the viewer in a
very dark navy dress with enormous puffed sleeves, a gathered bodice, a tightly belted waist
and a long full skirt reaching the ground; at her throat is a high yellow collar. Her dark
hair is drawn back, her face is pale and looks straight out. One hand rests at her waist, and
from it hangs a fine chain carrying a small round white object and, lower, a small yellow one.
The other hand hangs bare at her side, a pale bracelet at the wrist and a small gold ring on
one finger; tucked against her side behind it is a dark shaft with a curved gold handle. To
left and right stands dense green shrubbery of slender branching plants; white daisy-like
flowers at the lower left, scattered pink and white blossom, and above a pale sky with grey
cloud. The ground is a pale ochre path. At the lower right a small ginger-and-white cat stands
among dark flowers with pale yellow centres, one paw on a thread that runs across the ground
to a pale ball of yarn. At the lower left, among pale grassy foliage, is the dark signature
Henri Rousseau.
The dress carries the picture
Nearly half the canvas is a single dark area: the dress. The painter neither shades nor
models it but lays it down as an almost uniform dark field, out of which only the pale skin,
the yellow collar and the gold ring step forward. It is that flatness that makes the figure
feel larger than life. A comparably placed woman set against greenery appears in Portrait of a Woman in a Landscape, where
the dress is lighter and the background more open.
The cat and the ball of yarn
At the lower right the solemn portrait suddenly relaxes: a small cat holds a thread that
winds along the path to a ball of yarn. That detail is not an ornament but the only movement
in the picture – everything else stands still. Who is portrayed we do not claim: the record
gives the initial M. and nothing more, so we do not expand it. Nor do we date the work, since
the record gives a decade rather than a year. The other single-woman portrait in this group is
Woman with Basket of Eggs, and a group scene by the same hand is The Family.
What it means on the wall
The original measures 198 cm x 115 cm and is the tallest canvas in this group – the figure
is very nearly life-size. That is why it works best on a tall, quiet wall and with some
distance; at small sizes the cat, the yarn and the ring collapse into dots, while at tall
sizes the original effect returns, of meeting a person at full height. We do not reproduce
canvases at the original measurement; you choose the size for your wall. For the opposite
case, a wide scene with no figure in it, see View of the Bridge at Sèvres.
How a hand-painted reproduction is made
Every canvas is painted by hand in oils, to order, in the size you choose. The painter
works from a high-resolution photograph of the original, layer by layer, so that the yellow
collar, the bracelet, the curved gold handle and the cat with its ball of yarn stay legible at
smaller sizes too. Because this is hand work, two canvases of the same size always differ
slightly; that is not a fault but the difference between a painting and a print. Prices on
this page start at 155 EUR for the smallest size.
