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  • The Reading Girl

Théodore Roussel

The Reading Girl

1886–7

Image released under Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported)

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On loan

LWL-Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte Westfälisches (Munster, Germany): Nude: art from the Tate collection

Artist
Théodore Roussel 1847–1926
Medium
Oil paint on canvas
Dimensions
Support: 1527 × 1620 × 25 mm
Frame : 18900x 1973 × 174 mm
Collection
Tate
Acquisition
Presented by Mrs Walter Herriot and Miss R. Herriot in memory of the artist 1927
Reference
N04361
  • Summary
  • Display caption

Summary

French by birth and upbringing, Roussel moved to London after his first marriage in 1870. He was a close friend and pupil of Whistler and shared his love of Japanese art, evident here not only in the elegant kimono, casually draped over the folding chair, but in the overall treatment of space. The young girl is Hetty Pettigrew (1867-1953) who was the artist's favourite model and also posed, along with her sisters Rose and Lily, for Millais and Whistler. She met Roussel in 1884 and not only became his mistress but gave birth to his daughter. She continued to sit for him until he re-married in 1914.

In its frank nudity, flattening of forms and strong light-dark contrasts, The Reading Girl pays tribute to Edouard Manet's (1832-83) boldly subversive masterpiece, Olympia of 1863. But Roussel combines Manet's modernism with careful draughtsmanship and a more traditional classicism that looks back to J.A.D. Ingres (1780-1867). On the other hand, the subject is not presented as a classical Venus, but rather as a robust and healthy young woman, with a taste for current fashion. The discarded kimono, the model's elegant hairstyle and the folding campaign chair, are evidence of aesthetic preoccupations which align Roussel with such artists as Sir Frederic Leighton and the English Aesthetic movement. The critic Frederick Wedmore was impressed by the model's firm and youthful figure and compared the picture with 'the most health-suggesting, health-breathing of Courbets, with the most rosily robust of Caro Delvaille's (Le Sommeil fleuri), with the dreamiest Henner, with the slimmest and least material of Raphael Collin's (Floréal)' (Frederick Wedmore, 'Théodore Roussel', The Art Journal, 1909, p.184).

During the 1880s British art was moving away from an elevated, Neo-Classical interpretation of the nude towards a new naturalism, regarded as a threat to moral standards. Roussel's picture was exhibited at the New English Art Club in April 1887 and caused a mild scandal. The critic for the Spectator wrote: 'Our imagination fails to conceive any adequate reason for a picture of this sort. It is realism of the worst kind, the artist's eye seeing only the vulgar outside of his model, and reproducing that callously and brutally. No human being, we should imagine, could take any pleasure in such a picture as this; it is a degradation of Art' (Spectator, 16 April 1887).

Further reading:
Kenneth McConkey, British Impressionism, London 1989, p.57, reproduced p.50, in colour.

Frances Fowle
8 December 2000

Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.

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Display caption

Though based in Britain from 1870, Roussel was French, and this composition shows a debt to the fashion for Oriental art that swept France in the 1860s. The nude model, Hetty Pettigrew, provides the key element in Roussel's bold pictorial design. Her diagonal placing effectively cuts the square canvas in half, creating equal areas of light and dark. Roussel uses naturalistically painted detail to decorative effect. The luminosity of the model's skin tone is echoed by the peach fabric of the kimono, and is dramatically opposed to the blackness of the setting. In the opinion of Roussel's contemporary, the painter Sir William Orpen, this was the finest nude painting of his time.

Gallery label, August 2004

Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.

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New English Art Club Aesthetic movement

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