What appears to be a well-executed, straight-forward portrait rewards close attention with layers of meaning and some truly groundbreaking formal innovations. The young woman of the title is looking towards a mirror as she sketches for a self-portrait. The viewer occupies the position of the mirror and so the subject makes direct and searching eye-contact. Cleverly, the white paper on her drawing board reflects the window light onto her face, giving a slightly underlit ethereal softness as the direct light sets her hair aglow. This halo of light demarks her from the flat dark grey wall behind her.
The background is made up of a grid of flat rectangular forms, the floor, the wall, the four panes in the window and the board that rests on her lap. The woman’s organic form fluidly disrupts this strict grid. Her face is expressive and perhaps melancholy. At her eye level, through the window and in the receding space beyond the picture plane, we see a man and woman outside. Another rigid grid of rectangles in the façade of a building draws our eye to them, although they are small. Their positioning makes these figures significant and we also notice that the window pane that frames them is fractured. The shape of the curved crack in the glass almost exactly echoes the shape made by the back of the chair in which the young woman is sitting, creating visual parentheses that balance the diagonal of her torso.
So perhaps this woman is thinking about herself as she practices her art, about what she may be giving up, in order to pursue a career as a portrait painter. This was not a respectable job for a lady. Women were expected to marry and supervise the home. A working woman was almost synonymous with a prostitute. By giving herself to art, the idyll of marriage is fractured. This woman is not just a technically good painter. This piece is ambitious and displays many features that will be applauded when other painters experiment with very similar approaches.
The similar use of repeated forms ‘bracketing’ a composition will be seen in the works of Paul Cezanne in the 1870s. James Abbot McNeill Whistler’s famous painting, Arrangement in Black and Grey, Portrait of the Artist’s Mother (1871) bears more than a passing resemblance to Viller’s composition. Both these works have flattened the canvas and pay attention to the balance of rectilinear blocks of tone and colour, the figures are posed in a similar way and both at a fluid diagonal across the ‘patchwork’ background, the framing and edges of each painting are also given prominence by their composition and point of ‘cut-off’. Villers’ work is much brighter and also contains strong narrative and symbolist elements…
Why is 'Whistler’s Mother' so renowned as a groundbreaking approach to formal arrangement of shapes and blocks of tonal colour when Denise Villers produced this visually similar canvas 70 years earlier? Is it because Villers is French, or a woman? Some of her works (including this painting) have been wrongly attributed to her contemporary, Jacques-Louis David… and there remains some doubt as to the providence of this work, though experts seem to be in agreement about its dating. This means that whoever painted it, they painted it using approaches that were to be key in the development of Modernism and used these approaches seven decades in advance of the examples cited in most art histories.
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