Mirada sostenida. Óleo sobre papel. #oilopainting #artistinbluesky

German-born American artist Henry Mosler’s “The Quadroon Girl” depicts a Black woman with a lighter complexion posed in front of a pale gray background. She is turned slightly to the right and does not face the viewer. The woman has long black wavy hair that is parted in the middle and reaches down her back. Her face tilts to the right and is downturned. She appears to have a downcast expression on her face. A dangling gold earring peaks out from her hair. She is wearing a white garment wrapped around her chest; her shoulders are bare. She holds the fabric in place with bent arms and her hands cross over her chest. On her right wrist is a black manacle with a dangling chain. Her left elbow rests on a little-defined russet-colored piece of furniture. At the Paris Salon of 1878, this painting appeared alongside the following stanza of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1842 abolitionist poem, The Quadroon Girl: Her eyes were large, and full of light, Her arms and neck were bare; No garment she wore save a kirtle bright, And her own long, raven hair. A quadroon was a demeaning term for a person of one-quarter African descent and three-quarters white Euro-American. Longfellow’s poem, which tells the story of a Southern plantation owner who sold his own mixed-race daughter into bondage, expresses the cruel inhumanity of enslavement. Although we may surmise that Mosler opposed slavery, he was not a political artist. Literary themes were in vogue with the juries of the Salon, to whom he successfully presented this painting. To likely satisfy the taste of the privileged white male elite art establishment, he produced a romanticized and sensual portrait of Longfellow’s tragic heroine.

The Quadroon Girl by Henry Mosler (German-American)- Oil on canvas / 1878 - Cincinnati Art Museum (Ohio) #womeninart #art #artwork #portraitofawoman #oilopainting #HenryMosler #Mosler #womensart #CincinnatiArtMuseum #fineart #abolitionist #poem #HenryWadsworthLongfellow #Longfellow #ArtText

English-born painter John Everett Millais portrays a young woman plainly dressed in the soft country colors of harvest time, holding a basket of hand-picked violet flowers conveying the innocence and fragility of youth. The model was budding actress Beatrice Buckstone, granddaughter of actor and comedian John Baldwin Buckstone. She posed for three of Millais’ works and was so noted for her beauty that the artist’s son John Guille Millais wrote years later, “Her face was simply perfect, both in form and color, and nothing could be more charming than the contrast between her bright golden hair and those big, blue-grey Irish eyes that peeped at you from under the shade of the longest black lashes that ever adorned the human face. The pictures for which she sat in no way exaggerated her beauty; they were but portraits of her own sweet self.” It is a work with a very sentimental atmosphere. The title is taken from the long-forgotten love poem “Catarina to Camoens” by female English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The painting’s first owner was Everett Gray, the youngest brother of Millais’s wife, Effie, and it originally hung at the Gray family home, Bowerswell, near Perth, Scotland. Sir John Everett Millais was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), later known as the Pre-Raphaelites, which sought a return to the abundant detail, intense colors and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian art. He was a child prodigy who, aged eleven, became the youngest student to enter the Royal Academy Schools. In his life, he experimented and matured through different styles, but it was only through his later works that he became successful and, as a result, was one of the wealthiest artists of his day.

“Sweetest eyes were ever seen” by John Everett Millais (English) - Oil on canvas / 1881 - National Galleries of Scotland (Edinburgh) #womeninart #art #oilopainting #JohnEverettMillais #Millais #artwork #womensart #EnglishArtist #Pre-RaphaeliteBrotherhood #Pre-Raphaelite #NationalGalleriesofScotland