During the final decade of the nineteenth century, Louis Anquetin, like his friend Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, began to explore the expressive possibilities of caricature. This pastel, possibly depicting the cabaret performer and trombone player Marguerite Dufay, exploits the visual language of parody to striking effect, as the artist has amplified the subject’s breasts and narrowed her waist beyond any measure of realistic anatomical proportion (or standard of propriety). The result is a celebration of bawdy sexuality, which resonates with the ribald image of Dufay that Anquetin produced for a poster several years later.
Details
- Artist Name: Louis Anquetin (French, 1861-1932)
- Title: Portrait of a Woman (Marguerite Dufay?)
- Date: 1891
- Medium: Pastel on paper
- Dimensions: 24-3/4 x 20 in. (63 x 51 cm)
- Credit Line: Norton Simon Art Foundation
- Accession Number: M.1979.42.P
- Copyright: © Norton Simon Art Foundation
Object Information
[Galerie Nicolas Poussin, Paris, sold to];
?Nusuvitch or Mescovitch.
(sale Lille, 29 May 1972, lot 50).
[Galerie La Cave, Paris, sold 27 Apri 1976 to];
Norton Simon, acc. N.1976.28.4.P, gift 1979 to;
Norton Simon Art Foundation.
Société des Artistes Indépendants, 7me Exposition
- Paris, 1891-03-20 to 1891-04-27
Portriats et figures de femmes: Ingres à Picasso
- Paris, Société des amis du Musée du Luxembourg, 1928-06-01 to 1929-06-30
Splendor and Misery: Images of Prostitution in France 1850-1910
- Musée d'Orsay, 2015-09 to 2016-01
By Day & By Night: Paris in the Belle Époque
- Norton Simon Museum, 2019-10-04 to 2020-03-02
Gaze: Portraiture After Ingres
- Norton Simon Museum, 2009-10-30 to 2010-04-05
- Thomson, Richard, Toulouse-Lautrec, fig. 149c
- Sociéte des Artistes Indépendants, Société des Artistes Indépendants, 7me Exposition, 1891, presumably no. 22
- Lecomte, Georges, L'Art dans les deux mondes, 1891, no. 19 p. 225
- Jules, Antoine, La Plume, 1891, pp. 156-157
- Société des amis du Musée du Luxembourg, Portriats et figures de femmes: Ingres à Picasso, 1928, no. 1
- Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh and the Birth of Cloisonism, 1981, fig. 96 p. 254
- Destremau, Frédéric, Les Années d'avant-garde de Louis Anquetin, 1989, no. 13, ill. 28 pp. 167, 171-172, 176
- Brame & Lorenceau, Anquentin, La Passion d'être Peintre, 1991, cat. 15, doc. 20 p. 115
- Delannoy, Agnès, Symbolistes et Nabis, Maurice Denis et son temps, 1996, p. 32
- Brettell, Richard R. and Stephen F. Eisenman, Nineteenth-Century Art in the Norton Simon Museum, volume 1, 2006,
- Campbell, Sara, Collector Without Walls: Norton Simon and His Hunt for the Best, 2010, cat. 1364 p. 399
- Poletti, Katia and Rudolf Koella, Felix Vallotton: Critique d'art, 2011, Fig. 6 p. 33
- Isolde Pludermacher and Clair Dupin, Abécédaire de la Prostitution, 2015, p. 79
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