One of French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme’s most expressive portraits, “Femme circassienne voilée” (Veiled Circassian Beauty), was auctioned in 2008 for 2,057,250 GBP to the Qatar Museums Authority in Doha. It depicts a beautiful fair-skinned Parisian model in veil and costume portraying an idealized exotic (and thoroughly fictional) woman “based on” the artist’s multiple trips through Turkey, Algeria, Palestine, and Egypt. Even though many of Gérôme’s paintings are wondrous mixtures of color and decorated fabrics, this one seems to be the most sumptuous of all, with the beauty dressed in a very light-blue jacket with gold-embroidered decorations against a rich burnt-Pompeian red background. Gérôme was a wizard at inventing new color schemes that work, for instead of toning up the blue, or toning down the intensity of the red background, or increasing the blue, he balances it with the gold embroidery and lace of the jacket, and by the deeply colored rug upon which her arm reposes that ends a diagonal with the dark upper right corner, and crosses the diagonal of the baton in her hands. The woman is not on the main axis, and subtle areas of graded light holds her left shoulder, her bosom, and her hand in a tight composition that supports the vertical setup through her narrow nose. They are so subtly rich that they are simply masterful. The pensive face is above a contraposto that does not disturb the unwavering expression on her face. The solid pattern of the rug makes that of the jacket even more delicate while the bare hand is absolutely beautiful, both in accuracy and in its absent-minded repose. As part of the “Orientalist movement” in Western art, which focused on depicting the exotic cultures of the Middle East and North Africa, Gérôme’s lavish paintings became wildly popular, his depictions not only of resplendent courts, harems, and mosques, but “snapshot” compositions of everyday interiors and peoples catapulted him to fame throughout Europe.
Femme circassienne voilée (Veiled Circassian Beauty) by Jean-Léon Gérôme (French) - Oil on canvas / 1876 - Lusail Museum (Doha, Qatar) #womeninart #art #oilpainting #womensart #Jean-LéonGérôme #Jean-LeonGerome #LusailMuseum #QatarMuseums #fineart #portraitofawoman #artwork #veil #Gérôme #FrenchArt
