This striking mid-19th-century French oil painting depicts a girl seated quietly against a vivid crimson ground. Resting in her hands is a sheet of music referencing the work of French composer Hector Berlioz. It's a portrait of sensibility during the age of Romanticism.
One can imagine the proud parents of this musical young lady commissioning this portrayal and receiving the finished work with delight. There's restraint, yet she's given prominence via the contrast of her luminous white dress and the bold colouring of the background. Even the chair, with its warm upholstered tones and curved walnut arms, seems chosen to echo the sitter’s gentleness.
Yet it is the sheet music that gives the portrait its deepest resonance. The visible reference to Berlioz’s Retour, almost certainly connected to Lelio, ou le retour à la Vie, places this work within the cultured atmosphere of the French Romantic period. In 1842, Berlioz was still regarded as daring, modern, and emotionally radical. His music represented feeling elevated into art. To place such music in the hands of a young girl was a meaningful choice.
This was almost certainly a cultivated household in which music formed part of intellectual and emotional education. The sitter is presented as shaped by sound and modern Romantic ideals. It's a profoundly 19th-century idea: that art, music, and feeling will nurture the soul itself.
Dated in the lower left and held in a contemporary handmade gilt frame with scrolling foliate ornament and finely worked corner decoration.
Medium: Oil on canvas
Overall size: 30½” x 37” / 78cm x 94cm
Year of creation: 1842
Provenance: Private collection, France.
Condition: Cleaned. Revarnished. Craquelure throughout. Frame in excellent condition.
Our reference: BRV2302
