Day 199 - Nattier portrait

November 13, 2019

Gallery 539 is yet another period room of 18th century French furniture- fancy, fussy, gilded, and, except for a couple of bonheur du jour small desks, altogether not to my taste. Equally fancy and fussy are the porcelain candelabras that line the walls. Really, what kind of modern sensibility responds to this stuff? That said, I do find interesting a table with a black-and-gold Japanese lacquer rectangle repurposed as its top, both because the lacquer, though not the table itself, strikes me as quite beautiful and because the piece shows the desire of the furniture-maker to incorporate foreign, "exotic" art into his creation.

What I do like is a portrait, perhaps 28 inches high and 24 inches wide, of the Marquise Perrin de Cypierre, painted by Jean-Marc Nattier in 1753. The figure is presented from the waist up; her torso is turned away from the viewer, but her head turns back to look out at us. Her left elbow rests on a table, while in her plump left hand she holds several pink flowers; her right hand cups a piece of fruit.  The marquise's pink skin and especially her rosy cheeks (did she use rouge?) stand out against the dark ground and are set off by the blue shawl around her bare shoulders and the blue bow around her neck.  It's hard to tell how old she is (in the dim light, I can't tell whether her hair is blonde or gray), but her face is unlined. She isn't really smiling, but as she gazes out at us, you have a sense of her intelligence.