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Michael @mdstamper.bsky.social · 3h

“Salome” by Henri Regnault (French) – Oil on canvas / 1870 – The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) #WomenInArt #art #artText #artwork #PortraitofaWoman #BlueskyArt #TheMET #HenriRegnault #FrenchArtist #Regnault #peinture #ReligiousArt #1870s #MetropolitanMuseumofArt #Orientalism #AcademicRealism

French artist Henri Regnault’s “Salome” reimagines the biblical dancer infamous for demanding the head of John the Baptist. Instead of horror, the artist focuses on her magnetic persona before the act, her tools of power resting in hand. The work’s exotic fabrics and sensual pose reflect 19th-century Orientalist fantasies that conflated moral danger with female autonomy. Critics hailed the “Regnault yellow,” that radiant silk, as a marvel of technique.

The legendary young woman sits on an ornate chest over patterned carpet and fur. Her skin is a warm olive tone, illuminated by raking light that highlights the soft contours of her bare shoulders and décolletage and the sheen of the drapery over her legs. The golden silk wrap spills over her knees and cascades to the floor in radiant folds, its texture rendered with astonishing precision. Her thick loose long dark hair frames a poised face with half-smile and steady gaze. In her lap rests a shallow brass platter, reflecting a dim glow. Her left hand holds a knife. No head or blood appears; instead, the space hums with tension before impending action. The backdrop of embroidered cloth and gilded tones deepens the theatrical intimacy of this solitary image of the alluring and dangerous step daughter of Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee and Perea and son of Herod the Great.

Painted in Rome, Italy just before Regnault’s death in the Franco-Prussian War at age 27, “Salome” embodies youthful audacity and fascination with the threshold between life, beauty, and death. At the 1870 Paris Salon, it shocked audiences yet confirmed the artist’s genius. The painting’s enduring tension between seduction and sacrifice remains both beautiful and haunting.

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Michael @mdstamper.bsky.social · 3h

I agree 😎

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Michael @mdstamper.bsky.social · 5h

😍👍

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Michael @mdstamper.bsky.social · 15h

La Virgen Negra” by Alfredo Arreguín (Mexican-American) – Oil on canvas / 2013 – Bainbridge Island Museum of Art (Washington) #WomenInArt #art #artText #artwork #AlfredoArreguín #Arreguín #MexicanAmericanArtist #BlueskyArt #PNWart #ContemporaryArt #ReligiousArt #bskyart #BainbridgeIslandMuseumofArt

At the center of the canvas stands a serene Black Madonna, her rich brown skin softly illuminated against a patterned gold halo. She seems to be in prayer, arms slightly open in quiet welcome, her long robe and mantle dissolving into Arreguín’s signature mosaic of leaves, blossoms, fish, and birds. Hidden within these vivid textures, a slender, spotted wild cat prowls across the lower foreground with its elongated body and curling tail echoing the rhythms of the foliage. The animal’s amber eye catches a glint of divine light, anchoring the Virgin in a living world rather than a celestial one. Every inch of the surface teems with motion: turquoise vines twist into sacred geometry as floral tesserae shimmer like beadwork. The background is a continuous field of repeating organic forms in blues, greens, and golds, with hidden creatures emerging as you look. The Madonna’s presence feels both human and elemental.

Mexican-American artist Alfredo Arreguín’s “La Virgen Negra” fuses Catholic iconography with the artist’s own “pattern painting” style he developed from Mexican folk art and Pacific Northwest ecology. The Black Madonna, venerated across Europe and the Americas, embodies protection, resilience, and inclusion. For Arreguín, she becomes a guardian of an emerald world. By rendering Mary as Black and integrating her into a living mosaic of flora and fauna, Arreguín reframes devotion through cultural memory and biodiversity. The painting’s surface of thousands of small strokes suggests time, prayer, and care as if every motif is a cell in a larger organism.

In 2013, Arreguín was a celebrated elder of Latino art in Seattle, known for portraits (like Frida Kahlo, poets, & community figures) and for transforming memory into pattern. Exhibited in “Alfredo Arreguín—Life Patterns” at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art in 2018, “La Virgen Negra” invites us to find, and be found by, the sacred presence in the forest formed from the land and the people it shelters.

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Michael @mdstamper.bsky.social · 22h

“Helen of Troy” by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (British) – Oil on panel / 1863 – Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg, Germany) #WomenInArt #Pre-Raphaelite #PortraitofaWoman #AnnieMiller #BlueskyArt #DanteGabrielRossetti #Rosetti #art #artText #artwork #bskyart #HamburgerKunsthalle #BritishArt #BritishArtist

British artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti recasts Helen as both beauty and calamity in an image of desire whose spark topples empires. On the reverse, he inscribed Greek epithets from Aeschylus “destroyer of ships, destroyer of men, destroyer of cities” to make explicit the nexus of eros and ruin that Victorian audiences knew well. He even wrote home in early 1863 asking for stereoscopic views of cities and fleets to help him paint Troy in the background, fusing classical subject with modern visual aids and the Pre-Raphaelite taste for exacting detail.

She faces us at bust length, centered and still, with light skin and wavy copper-gold hair that fans to her shoulders. Her gaze is steady, almost challenging, with heavy eyelids. Her lips are full and soft. A warm, amber garment with patterned trim crosses her chest as a narrow cord gathers the fabric at the neckline. In her hands, she lifts a small flame pendent whose glow seems to kiss her cheek. Along the upper edge, the distant city smolders with dark silhouettes of towers and ramparts against a smoky sky plus hints of ships and conflagration beyond. The palette burns with reds, ochres, and browns. The polished panel surface heightens the dense color and the sculptural modeling of her face. The space is shallow and theatrical with Helen pressing forward while destruction flickers behind her.

The model is Annie Miller, a frequent presence in Pre-Raphaelite circles; her strong features and abundant hair helped Rossetti shape the archetype of the commanding, self-possessed heroine that would culminate in later figures like Lilith and Proserpine. Painted the year after the death of his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, the picture also tracks the artist’s turn from narrative scenes to iconic women, where myth becomes psychology. Shown close and frontal, Helen is not a passive prize but an agent: she grips fire, framed by a city she cannot quite save or disown for a meditation on responsibility, allure, and consequence.

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Michael @mdstamper.bsky.social · 1d

“Reilly” by Leah McCann (American) – Oil pastel on paper / 2023 – Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts (62nd Young Arkansas Artists Exhibition, Little Rock) #WomenInArt #art #artText #artwork #WomanArtist #WomensArt #BlueskyArt #WomenPaintingWomen #StudentArt #HighSchoolArt #ArkansasMuseumofFineArts

A young woman lies diagonally across a wide meadow dense with tall green grass and spring wildflowers of pale yellows, purples, and soft blues clustering around her hair and shoulders. Most of her body has almost been absorbed by the meadow except her head, shoulders, and parts of her arms. Her pale skin glows in the warm afternoon light as loose strands of brown hair frame a resting face turned to the side, eyes closed as if feeling the sun rather than watching it. Quick pastel strokes suggest both texture and wind movement that disappears in a blur of color, blending figure and landscape. Nothing feels staged: the marks are layered and visible, the texture of oil pastel creating a living surface that catches light differently from each angle with distinct tonal contrast between the figure’s outline and the green meadow around her.

Leah McCann’s “Reilly” captures a moment between consciousness and dream, when identity and environment seemingly dissolve into one another. Created while she was a 10th-grade student at Little Rock Central High School under art educator Jason McCann, the work’s title may reference a friend or self-portrait surrogate. The reclining pose and fusion with nature evoke classical pastoral repose but through a distinctly contemporary, adolescent lens that is honest, unfiltered, and intimate. Her work and pastel’s immediacy mirrors the emotional directness of youth as the field becomes both a sanctuary and likely a metaphor for inner growth.

Reilly stood out in the 62nd Young Arkansas Artists Exhibition for its technical maturity and quiet assurance, reminding viewers that serenity itself can be radical. “When I draw,” McCann noted in a local student-art feature, “I’m trying to hold on to the feeling before it changes.” Her work invites us to pause with her in that fragile, luminous stillness between childhood and becoming an adult.

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Michael @mdstamper.bsky.social · 1d

🫶🏻🫱🏻‍🫲🏽

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Michael @mdstamper.bsky.social · 1d

“Charlotte of Belgium as Queen of Mexico” by Franz Xaver Winterhalter (German) – Oil on canvas / 1864 – Hearst Castle (San Simeon, California) #WomenInArt #PortraitofaWoman #Winterhalter #FranzXaverWinterhalter #art #artText #artwork #RoyalArt #PortraitofaQueen #HearstCastle #BlueskyArt #Royalty

Painted in Paris in 1864, this royal portrait celebrates Charlotte of Belgium as the newly styled Empress Carlota of Mexico at the dawn of the Second Mexican Empire. German artist Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Europe’s pre-eminent court portraitist, was commissioned to portray the imperial couple; a companion portrait of Emperor Maximilian forms the pair. The artist’s signature polish served politics: smooth textures, controlled light, and impeccable fashion declared legitimacy for a fragile throne.

She appears three-quarter length against a smooth, violet-gray background. The young royal with light skin turns slightly left with a calm, indirect gaze. Her dark brown hair is center-parted and drawn back into a long braid, decorated at the back with small pink flowers as a floral, jewel-studded tiara rests above a fine, translucent veil that falls behind her shoulders. She wears an elegant off-the-shoulder pink gown with wide satin bands and layered ivory lace ruffles across the bodice and sleeves plus jeweled brooches. A thick gold and jeweled necklace circles her neck. A sheer tulle shawl swirls across her forearms and the pink skirt. On her wrists are gold bracelets.

Soon after their arrival in Mexico City in June 1864, Charlotte acted as regent during Maximilian’s absences, presiding over ceremonies and reforms from Chapultepec. The promise proved brief. As French military support ebbed, she sailed to Europe in 1866 to plead for aid; the mission failed, her health collapsed, and Maximilian was executed in 1867. Charlotte lived on in Belgium until 1927. Seen from that arc, the portrait fixes a moment of radiant certainty with satin brilliance, imperial orders, and youthful resolve … just before history turned. Its survival at Hearst Castle, far from Paris and Mexico City, underscores how images of power survive even when empires do not.

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Michael @mdstamper.bsky.social · 1d

“La Roumaine en robe rouge (Romanian Woman in a Red Dress)” by Félix Vallotton (Swiss-French) – Oil on canvas / 1925 – Musée d’Orsay (Paris, France) #WomenInArt #FélixVallotton #Vallotton #FelixVallotton #art #artText #artwork #Muséed’Orsay #PortraitofaWoman #OilPainting #Arte #pintura #peinture

Painted the year he died, this is among Félix Vallotton’s last and most debated portraits as an interwar realist departure from his Nabi-style flatness toward an almost clinical precision. Born in Lausanne and naturalized French, Vallotton spent his final years reengaging portraiture with unsparing clarity. The woman is identified in several sources as Mado Leviseano, a Romanian sex worker in Paris. Her tilted, close-cropped by the frame posture pushes intimacy into discomfort, which helped the picture cause a minor scandal when shown. Vallotton wrote that bodies “have their own individual expressions… the joy, the pain, the boredom,” a credo legible here in the tension between sumptuous red and guarded gaze.

The seated young Leviseano sits against a flat, saturated red backdrop that nearly merges with her strappy red dress. She leans toward us from a dark, carved armchair, shoulders bare, the thin beaded straps glinting. Her short, dark hair is wavy while strong brows and crimson lips focus her face. Light falls across the collarbones and upper arms, modeling skin with porcelain clarity while leaving faint shadows across her neck. The dress’s surface of lace-like motifs and tiny sequins catches highlights across the bodice and gathered skirt. One hand, relaxed over her lap, shows a large bright ring as the other drapes along the chair’s arm. Her mouth is slightly open, eyes slanting towards us with a wary, almost challenging look. The red field, chair, and garment compress space, turning the body’s angles and the metal studs into crisp punctuation in a near-photographic stillness.

The painting was donated in 1926 by the artist’s widow, Gabrielle Vallotton, to the Musée du Luxembourg and later to the Musée d’Orsay; since 1977 it has been on display at the Centre Pompidou’s Musée national d’art moderne. The work distills Vallotton’s late style of hard edges, enamel-smooth paint, and a cool, dispassionate eye that frames womanhood not as allegory but as presence.

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Michael @mdstamper.bsky.social · 2d

“Dinah (Portrait of a Negress)” by Eastman Johnson (American) – Oil on paperboard / c. 1867–1869 – Gibbes Museum of Art (Charleston, South Carolina) #WomenInArt #AmericanArt #EastmanJohnson #art #artText #artwork #GibbesMuseumofArt #GibbesMuseum #BlueskyArt #bskyart #PortraitofaWoman #OilPainting

Although this painting is commonly known as “Dinah” or “Portrait of a Negress,” neither term originated with American artist Eastman Johnson. “Dinah” was often a generic name assigned to Black women in 19th-century song and minstrel culture, and “Negress” was a racialized label that erased personal identity. The real woman’s name is lost, yet her humanity resists anonymity: her posture upright, her gaze unwavering.

The older Black woman sits upright, resting both hands on the curved head of a walking stick that rises beneath her chin. She wears a soft blue apron beneath a brown shawl edged with red and blue, and a striped headwrap that frames her composed, thoughtful face. Her gaze is steady, intelligent, and full of quiet endurance. The background fades to deep shadow, while light grazes her rounded features and textured fabrics, illuminating a presence that feels both personal and symbolic. Johnson’s brushwork is spare and intimate, emphasizing the sitter’s dignity rather than idealizing her which was likely a radical gesture in an age when Black figures were seldom depicted as individuals.

Created shortly after the Civil War, the painting reflects Johnson’s evolving commitment to portraying African Americans with empathy and moral gravity. His abolitionist family background and Reconstruction-era travels informed his desire to depict the daily strength of Black life. The woman’s cane, apron, and expression hint at years of labor and resilience, inviting us to see story instead of stereotype.

Exhibited in The Portrayal of the Negro in American Painting (Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 1964) and Eastman Johnson: Painting America (Brooklyn Museum, 1999), the work continues to provoke questions of representation, authorship, and voice. Through her gaze, the woman,now known only as “Dinah,” endures as an image of quiet resistance, a reminder of both visibility and tribulation.

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Michael @mdstamper.bsky.social · 3d

“The Soldier’s Wife” by Elizabeth Cann (Canadian) – Oil on canvas / 1941 – Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (Halifax) #WomenInArt #WomenArtists #WomensArt #CanadianArtist #1940s #ArtGalleryofNovaScotia #BlueskyArt #art #artText #artwork #ElizabethCann #femaleartist #portraitofawoman #WWIIart #ArtoftheDay

Painted in 1941, at the height of the Second World War, “The Soldier’s Wife” stands apart from most Canadian war art of its time. Rather than glorifying conflict, artist Elizabeth Cann portrays emotional endurance through the invisible labor of love, longing, and survival during war. Halifax-born and trained at Mount Allison Ladies’ College, Cann taught art while painting portraits and scenes rooted in everyday experience. Here, she gives voice to women who bore war’s weight privately, at kitchen tables and in silence.

A woman sits in a small room cradling a mixing bowl in her lap. She wears a deep plum-colored top with long sleeves and a delicate brooch pinned at her neckline. Her light brown hair is neatly swept back, exposing her pale face deep in thought. The rosy-beige floral wallpaper presses close around her, amplifying the intimacy of the scene. A wall calendar to her right quietly signals time’s passage. The woman’s posture bends slightly forward, her shoulders sloping with weariness; her gaze, cast downward, drifts inward rather than outward. A handkerchief rests beside her, and her fingers hover loosely over the bowl’s rim, as though she has paused mid-task. The room’s warmth contrasts the cool tension of her expression, capturing the stillness and sorrow of waiting.

Art historian Laura Brandon notes that such works “transform domestic interiors into sites of psychological drama.” The woman’s identity remains unknown allowing her anonymity to represent the countless women left “behind” during war, suspended between hope and fear. Through quiet composition and empathy, Cann captures a different heroism: the courage to wait, to keep faith, and to endure the unseen.

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Michael @mdstamper.bsky.social · 3d

“Thiếu nữ Huế (Hue Girl)” aka “Lady” by Mai Trung Thứ (Mai Trung Thu) (Vietnamese) – Oil on canvas / 1934 – Singapore Art Museum #WomenInArt #art #artText #artwork #PortraitofaLady #MaiTrungThứ #MaiTrungThu #BlueskyArt #SingaporeArtMuseum #VietnameseArtist #VietnameseArt #1930s #PortraitofaWoman

Painted in 1934, Thiếu nữ Huế (Hue Girl) — sometimes titled Lady — embodies Vietnamese artist Mai Trung Thứ’s refined synthesis of French academic training and Vietnamese poetics. A graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine in Hanoi, Thứ moved to France, joining a generation of artists who navigated identity amid colonial modernity. His women, clothed in flowing áo dài and framed in muted tones, became emblems of cultural continuity in a rapidly changing world.

Seated on a low reddish wooden bench, a young Vietnamese woman wears a high-collared, long-sleeved áo dài in pale grey. Her head tilts slightly to our left, eyes turned softly to the same side rather than toward us. Her warm light-brown skin is modeled gently; dark hair is swept up in a neat chignon (not loose on the shoulders). Her right hand rests across her lap as the left arm extends back with the hand relaxed over the bench edge, fingers loose. Her long tunic drapes over a layered skirt, its hem pooling at the seat. Behind her is a flat, textured ochre field with no drapery or furniture other than the bench. The mood is quiet and inward for a poised, thoughtful, and reserved portrait.

The flattened ochre ground and restrained palette frame the unidentified sitter as a self-contained presence, while the delicate modeling and dignified pose express a tenderness central to his portraits. Through subtle elegance rather than overt resistance, Thứ bridged East and West, giving modern Vietnamese painting its lyrical voice. As art historian T.K. Sabapathy observed, Thứ’s portraits are “poised between nostalgia and renewal.” In “Hue Girl,” that balance endures like a serene vision of womanhood and homeland, distilled into light, fabric, and memory.

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Michael @mdstamper.bsky.social · 3d

“The Green Sari” by Irma Stern (South African) – Oil on canvas / 1936 – Irma Stern Museum (Cape Town, South Africa) #WomenInArt #WomanArtist #IrmaStern #WomensArt #WomenPaintingWomen #WomenArtists #SouthAfricanArt #SouthAfricanArtist #BlueskyArt #OilPainting #FemaleArtist #art #artText #artwork

Painted in 1936, this portrait reflects artist Irma Stern’s fascination with the diverse communities of South Africa and her commitment to character over costume. Critics often note her “dignified” portrayals; here, the calm face, lowered eyes, and reed-filled setting suggest poise rather than spectacle. The jewelry and fine sari imply a sitter of some standing, likely from the Indian community established in Natal by the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Stern’s impasto scraped and laid on in quick, directional marks keeps the surface alive, especially in the sari’s creamy folds and the reeds’ vertical energy.

A woman appears against tall, pale-green reeds, her head tilted slightly left, gaze lowered and thoughtful. Her medium-brown skin is modeled with thick, lively strokes. Her eyelids are heavy, almond-shaped, with dark lashes and a soft highlight along the brow. A deep-green sari blouse and a creamy pallu drapes diagonally across her chest, edged with a fine green line. A single red stud earring catches the light while at her neck hangs a pendant with a rosy stone in a gold setting. Her black hair is pulled back into a low knot. The background is a field of vertical, grass-like strokes, echoing the sari’s green and framing her quiet, dignified presence.

Stern once wrote that travel and encounter “opened new doors of color”; even at home, she sought subjects whose presence sparked that chromatic charge. Exhibited as “An Indian Woman” at the Irma Stern Museum in 2020 and later titled “The Green Sari,” the work carries a layered history (it earlier appeared at auction as “Malay Lady in Green”), but Stern’s intent holds steady: to honor a modern woman with individuality and grace. As her reputation grew, Stern balanced local portraits with journeys abroad, refining a palette of greens, yellows, and warm earth tones that became signature in her mature style.

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Michael @mdstamper.bsky.social · 3d

Le Retour de la mer (Return from the Sea) by Félix Vallotton (Swiss-French) – Oil on canvas / 1924 – Musée d’Art et d’Histoire de Genève (Switzerland) #WomenInArt #LesNabis #Post-Impressionism #BlueskyArt #FélixVallotton #FelixVallotton #Vallotton #art #artText #1920s #Muséed’Artetd’HistoiredeGenève

Painted in 1924, near the end of Swiss-French artist Félix Vallotton’s life, this “simili-portrait” belongs to a series in which he sought to “represent human types rather than individuals,” using unnamed sitters to test contrasts of color, texture, and form. Here, a "modern woman" of the 1920s with short hair, cosmetics, and off-the-shoulder loose dress becomes an emblem, not a likeness.

She sits close to the picture plane, cropped below the waist, her body turned slightly as if pausing while reading to look directly at us. Her eyes are almond-shaped and heavy-lidded, edged with subtle eyeliner and neat, arched brows as their dark irises glint small highlights. A sea-blue satin dress slips off one shoulder while matching blue drapery gathers at her forearm, setting up a play of reveal and conceal. Her bobbed dark hair frames a made-up face as her skin appears sun-warmed against a flat, warm background that keeps all attention on the figure. Edges are crisp, volumes simplified, and the silk fabric come across as cool planes of color rather than rippling folds. There is no ocean yet the title suggests briny air and a recent shore, an atmosphere echoed by the dress’s blue and the model’s poised, modern self-possession. The scene is quiet, frontal, and deliberately anonymous.

The cool detachment of Vallotton’s late style, often summarized as “fire beneath the ice,” is everywhere: sensual shoulder and satin are offset by an implacable stillness and exacting contour. Geneva’s museum lists an earlier title, Femme à la draperie bleue, underscoring how fabric and hue carry the picture’s meaning. Acquired in 1929, the work was featured in the major retrospective "Vallotton. Le feu sous la glace" (Grand Palais, Van Gogh Museum, Mitsubishi Ichigokan), reaffirming how these distilled “types” compress symbol, fashion, and psychology into a single, unforgettable pose.

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Michael @mdstamper.bsky.social · 4d

Portrait of Trude Engel by Egon Schiele (Austrian) - Oil on canvas / c. 1912 - Lentos Kunstmuseum (Linz, Austria) #WomenInArt #art #artText #artwork #EgonSchiele #Schiele #AustrianArtist #AustrianArt #oilpainting #PortraitofaWoman #LentosKunstmuseum #BlueskyArt #VienneseExpressionist #Expressionism

A young woman stands facing us within a shallow, flattened space. Her wavy long, dark brown hair falls loose past her shoulders; her skin is light, with a faint rose warmth at the cheeks. She wears a modest, long-sleeved dress with a high neckline. Its folds are indicated by taut, economical brushstrokes rather than soft volume. She is framed by a reddish, triangular field that rises like an apex behind her head and shoulders, set against earthy browns and oranges.

Austrian artist Egon Schiele’s contour lines are sharp and irregular, darkly encircling her arms, jaw, and collar. Her gaze is direct and steady though a little guarded with her lips closed. Whether she stands or sits is intentionally ambiguous.

Trude Engel was the daughter of Schiele’s Viennese dentist; the portrait grew from that relationship and an arrangement that exchanged treatment for art. Later technical study revealed an earlier composition beneath the paint: an allegorical figure with a skull-like head, aligning with Schiele’s recurring themes of life and death. Family correspondence recounts that, as a teenager, Trude slashed the canvas in anger; the repairs remain part of the work’s material history and can be seen. Painted as both Schiele’s reputation and controversy rose, the image condenses his radical portrait language: incisive line, compressed space, and psychological charge. The triangular, mantle-like field behind Trude reads as both halo and warning sign, intensifying her composed yet uneasy presence.

In 1912 Schiele was jailed briefly, an ordeal that sharpened his sense of human vulnerability; in his prison drawings he simply wrote, “I am human,” a sentiment that resonates in Trude’s unsentimental, searching gaze that is less a likeness than a revelation of being.

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Michael @mdstamper.bsky.social · 4d

“The Red I” by Whitfield Lovell (American) – Conté on paper with attached found object / 2021 – Cincinnati Art Museum (Ohio) #WomenInArt #WhitfieldLovell #art #artText #artwork #Lovell #AfricanAmericanArt #CincinnatiArtMuseum #BlueskyArt #AmericanArtist #PortraitofaWoman #BlackAmericanArt #ContéArt

In “The Red I,” American artist Whitfield Lovell merges portraiture and found object to evoke memory and ancestry, a hallmark of his conceptual tableaux that blend drawing, assemblage, and the poetics of history. Beginning in the late 1990s, he developed these stand-alone scenes that are almost ghostly yet grounded and inspired by vintage photographs of unnamed African Americans whose stories were never recorded. His process reanimates these lives, freeing them from prescribed narratives while allowing presence to emerge from silence.

A dark-skinned young woman gazes slighyly to our left, her thoughtful eyes avoiding direct contact with us. Lovell renders her in soft black conté lines against a vivid red paper background, her 19th-century attire detailed with high-necked, long sleeves, and three rows of buttons that trace the bodice’s form. A large rose blooms at her chest; her right arm crosses her waist holding a sprig of leaves and a flower. Her hair is swept into an elegant updo while delicate dangle earrings catch light against her cheek. The drawing, measuring nearly four feet tall, rests within a deep black frame lined in darker red. At its lower left edge, a small circular black vase with neck narrow and mouth flared protrudes from the composition, bridging the world of the viewer and the drawn figure through shadow and reflection.

The “Reds” series, to which this piece belongs, explores emotional intensity and remembrance through color and ritual object. The artist combines charcoal drawings of individuals with found objects that extend into the viewer’s space. Many feature exquisite, highly finished figures who appear as if emerging organically from the surface. The found vase acts as both vessel and offering like an echo of mourning, devotion, and endurance. Lovell has described his works as “visual poems” that “summon spirits from the past,” inviting us to contemplate how identity, loss, and love persist across generations, even if names are forgotten.

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Michael @mdstamper.bsky.social · 5d

“Sophie Crouzet” by Louis Hersent (French) – Oil on canvas / c. 1801 – The Cleveland Museum of Art (Ohio) #WomenInArt #PortraitofaWoman #Neoclassical #Enlightenment #BlueskyArt #neoclassicism #FrenchArt #FrenchArtist #oilpainting #art #artText #artwork #ClevelandMuseumofArt #LouisHersent #Hersent

In this luminous Neoclassical portrait by French artist Louis Hersent, a young woman with warm pale skin and softly waved brown hair is shown seated at a desk against a white wall backdrop. She turns to meet our gaze with poise and calm intelligence. She wears a high-waisted white muslin gown with short sleeves and a Grecian drape, the delicate fabric gathered beneath the bust. Her bare arms and neckline glow in the diffused light, revealing a natural warmth rather than idealized pallor. The subtle transparency of her gown, rendered in fine brushwork, contrasts with the subdued shadow behind her. The artist’s attention to her thoughtful expression and gentle posture, holding a paper, conveys dignity, intellect, and a sense of self-possession. Hersent’s smooth handling of tone and texture exemplifies early 19th-century French precision, with human presence expressed through restraint and grace.

Painted around 1801, “Sophie Crouzet” reflects the rise of virtue and simplicity as moral ideals after the French Revolution. The sitter’s Roman-inspired dress (a “robe à la grecque”) symbolized democratic purity, aligning women with civic virtue. The muslin’s gauzy lightness echoed Enlightenment notions of transparency and natural reason, while the white hue suggested moral integrity. Hersent, a pupil of Jacques-Louis David, merged neoclassical rigor with intimate human warmth, distancing his work from David’s stern heroics.

The sitter, Sophie Crouzet, remains a partially mysterious figure. She likely belonged to a bourgeois family sympathetic to revolutionary ideals, perhaps from southern France, where the Crouzet name appears among reformers. Despite her limited biography, the painting’s style and symbolism align her with a generation of educated women who adopted Greco-Roman dress to express civic virtue and intellectual equality. It was possibly commissioned to celebrate Sophie’s youth or marriage, marking her as both fashionable and virtuous in Napoleonic society.

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Michael @mdstamper.bsky.social · 5d

“To Tell Them There It’s Got To” by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (British) – Oil on canvas / 2013 – The Box (Plymouth, England) #WomenInArt #WomenArtists #WomensArt #FemalePainter #LynetteYiadom-Boakye #Yiadom-Boakye #TheBox #art #artText #artwork #blueskyArt #BlackWoman #OilPainting #WomenPaintingWomen

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Michael @mdstamper.bsky.social · 5d

"Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I" by Gustav Klimt (Austrian) – Oil, gold, and silver on canvas / 1907 – Neue Galerie New York #WomenInArt #GustavKlimt #Klimt #art #artText #artwork #AustrianArtist #PortraitofaWoman #NeueGalerieNewYork #NeueGalerie #gold #fin-de-siècle #ViennaSecession #ArtNouveau