Description
Two Women – the museum will not settle on a year
Two women are painted to the waist, both turned straight towards the viewer. The older one at the left wears a blue-grey dress with a small pattern and a high collar; her face is strongly built up, her hair dark and long. The younger one at the right is in a coral-orange dress with a white collar, her hair chestnut. Her hand rests on the other woman’s forearm. Behind them stands a dense green crown of leaves; at the left the roof of a low house with a warm pink wall can be seen, and at the right a pale blue sky with a white cloud. At the lower left grows a plant with broad leaves and red flowers. The work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York under inventory number 1997.391.3.
The museum record gives two years, not one
On the date the museum does not choose: the record reads 1901 or 1902. That is not a gap in the description but the fact itself. The work was made in the painter’s last years, when he was already in the Marquesas, and by giving two years the museum is saying that no closer dating exists. We do not narrow it to a single year: where the museum leaves two, we print both.
Both faces look straight out at us
The arrangement is unusually quiet: neither woman is doing anything, neither looks towards the other, and both look out of the painting. The scene therefore has no action, but it has the tension of a double portrait, in which the people being looked at are two and not one. The only contact between them is the hand on the forearm.
How the canvas came to the museum
The record gives the route as well: the work belonged to the collection of Walter and Leonore Annenberg. It came to the museum as a gift in 1997 and then by bequest in 2002. It is therefore a two-stage passage from a private collection into a public one, and not a purchase.
The measurement is given in inches first
The museum record gives the measurement in inches first and only afterwards, in brackets, in centimetres, as height by width. We mention it because in carrying such records over the two numbers are easily swapped: the canvas is landscape, wider than it is tall.
How a hand-painted reproduction is made
Every painting here is made by hand in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke. In this motif the faces are the hardest part: they are built from warm and cool tones set side by side rather than from shading, and if those merge the faces lose both their age and their calm. Before dispatch you receive a photograph of the finished work for approval. Nothing on these pages is printed; the colour is mixed and laid on again for each canvas.
- Subject: a double portrait of two women before green leaves and a low house.
- Technique: oil on canvas, coral orange beside blue-grey.
- Sizes: landscape format, from 40 x 32 cm to 200 x 160 cm; 80 x 64 cm and 100 x 80 cm are often chosen.
- Of note: the museum dates the work to 1901 or 1902, that is, with two years.
From the same collection and period, see also Two Tahitian Women, A Farm in Brittany and Ia Orana Maria. The museum record gives the measurement as height by width: 73.7 x 92.1 cm.
