Description
Poèmes barbares (Barbarian Poems) – a signature that stands at the top of the canvas
The centre of the picture is taken by a young woman, bare to the waist, with black hair falling on either side of her face. Her eyes are lowered, her right hand raised flat against her chest; with the other arm she leans on a blue-green cloth in her lap. She sits on a dark bench. Behind her a strong orange-red ground glows, and directly behind her head a blue-black vertical band rises. At the lower left a small dark figure crouches with large pale green eyes and its knees drawn up; a yellow glow spreads around it, and beside it lies a small yellow-green shape. The work is held by the Harvard Art Museums, Fogg Museum, under the inventory number 1951.49, as part of the collection of Maurice Wertheim.
A signature that is not at the bottom
A painter’s signature is almost always found along the lower edge. Here it is otherwise: the museum record states that the signature and the year are at the upper left, and the title is written there too. On the canvas both are clearly visible, just below the top edge, in small script on the red ground. The upper left corner works like the title page of a book rather than the edge of a picture.
Letters written unevenly
The inscription is not printed but written by hand, and the letters are not of equal size. The museum’s transcription even preserves a capital in the middle of a word, and on the canvas it really is there. This is the painter’s own handwriting and not a later marking; it is precisely its unevenness that makes it look more like a note than a title.
Two gazes that never meet
The woman looks downward, her eyes almost closed. The small figure beside her, by contrast, stares straight ahead, with pale eyes that are the brightest point in the whole picture. The gazes meet nowhere. That is why the scene feels quiet and uneasy at once: someone in the picture is looking, and someone else is not.
How a hand-painted reproduction is made
Every reproduction here is hand-painted in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke. In this motif the red ground is the hardest part: it must stay even and hot, or the figure in front of it loses its light. Before dispatch you receive a photograph of the finished work for approval.
- Subject: a seated woman before a red ground, with a small dark figure with pale eyes beside her.
- Technique: oil on canvas, a hot red ground and a calmly modelled face.
- Sizes: portrait format, from 30 x 40 cm to 150 x 200 cm; 60 x 80 cm and 90 x 120 cm are often chosen.
- Of note: the title and signature are painted at the upper left, not along the bottom edge.
If the same period interests you, see also Nevermore (O Tahiti), Te arii vahine (The King’s Wife) and Woman Holding a Fruit; Where Are You Going?. The museum gives the measurement as height by width: 64.8 x 48.3 cm.
