Description:
dark haired young woman standing on empty stage before a plain dark curtain wearing a black dress with three-quarter length sleeves, her hands are held together and her head is turned slightly toward her proper left shoulder; woman; costume/uniform
Label Text:
Woman in Black is a portrait of Chase’s student and model, Marietta Benedict Cotton. The painting is an exercise in restraint, a composition built on just three interlocking shapes: the textured drapery backdrop, the smooth-surfaced ground (tipped down to reduce the sense of spatial depth), and the contained figure of the young woman. While her form is slightly left of center on the canvas, her gaze in the opposite direction serves to balance the composition. Rendered almost entirely in shades of brown and black, Chase’s judicious strokes of red lend Woman in Black a sense of coloristic animation.
In this small, unassuming work, Chase assimilates two stylistic traditions: the dark tonalities of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings of interiors, and the spatial abstractions being explored by American modernist painters.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+1900.16.1 |
