Description
Portrait of Suzanne Bambridge – the dress that swallows the figure
The woman sits turned almost frontally towards us, in a long dark dress with a small floral pattern that covers her from the throat to the floor. At the neck she wears a broad pale trim, and her hands are folded low, near the lower left edge of the picture. Behind her a wall is painted in cool blue-green, across which plant motifs wind; on the right a piece of red chair back can be seen. Her face is serious and calm, her gaze directed a little past us. The work was made in 1891, during the painter’s first stay in Tahiti, and is held by the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels under the inventory number 4491. The measurement is 70 x 50 cm, a portrait format; the museum record gives it as height by width.
The pattern that swallows the body
The dress is not painted as a garment fitting the body but as a large surface strewn with small flowers. Shoulders, waist and knees are lost inside it; there are no folds to show where the body bends. For that reason only two things really come out of the picture: the face and one hand. Everything else is pattern.
Two pale places in a dark surface
It is this arrangement that makes the portrait feel so gathered. The pale trim at the neck and the pale skin of the hands are the only places that break the dark mass of the dress, and the eye travels up and down between them. The blue-green wall behind is cool and even, so that nothing distracts from that vertical path.
What the museum record states
The museum register gives the painter, the year 1891, the technique of oil on canvas, the name of the sitter and the fact that a signature and a date are present on the canvas. The transcription of the signature is not reproduced here letter for letter: from the painting alone we cannot judge every letter with confidence, and we do not correct a museum record. What can be said is that the signature on the canvas is visible.
How a hand-painted reproduction is made
Every reproduction here is hand-painted in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke. In this motif the pattern of the dress is the hardest part: the flowers must stay small and uneven, or the dress turns into wallpaper and the portrait loses its weight. Before dispatch you receive a photograph of the finished work for approval.
- Subject: a seated woman in a long dark floral dress before a blue-green wall.
- Technique: oil on canvas, the dark surface of the dress and two pale places.
- Sizes: portrait format, from 35 x 50 cm to 140 x 200 cm; 50 x 70 cm and 65 x 90 cm are often chosen.
- Of note: out of the large dark surface of the dress only the face and one hand emerge.
If the same period interests you, see also Nevermore (O Tahiti), Three Tahitian Women and Ia Orana Maria.
