Femme lisant à l'angle d'un piano

Overview

Femme lisant à l'angle d'un piano is a drawing — crayon, charcoal, frotté and gratté, 24,6 × 19,2 cm on a mount of 53 × 40 cm — in the Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, inv. PPD929. It was given by the artist's mother in 1907, five years after she gave the same museum La Parisienne.

It is undated. Marie left far more drawings than paintings — the 1885 posthumous catalogue lists 118 of them against 100 paintings, plus another eighty-odd academic studies from the model — but almost none of that graphic work survives in public collections. This sheet is one of the few, and Paris Musées has released it under CC0 at 4317 × 5531 px, so it is also one of the best-reproduced things she made.

Description

A woman reading, seated at the corner of a piano. The technique is worth noticing: alongside crayon and charcoal the museum records frotté (rubbed) and gratté (scratched back) — the drawing is worked additively and subtractively, lights lifted out of the black rather than left as blank paper. That is studio-trained handling, not sketchbook shorthand.

The subject joins the two occupations that fill Marie's own days more than any others besides painting: reading and music. She read voraciously and played the piano, the harp and the guitar; a woman reading at the corner of a piano is very close to a picture of her own drawing-room life.

*It is the 1885 plate La Lecture. The 1885 exhibition catalogue lists among its drawings a La Lecture (no. 116), and it reproduces four drawings after nature as plates, one captioned La Lecture. That plate shows this sheet: the woman reading at the corner of the piano, the keyboard below her, the tall lamp at upper left (Gallica views 45–48). The plate carries no number, so it is very probable but not proven that the sheet is no. 116 rather than another drawing of the same title. Two other plates in the same set reproduce drawings now at the Musée d'Orsay, La Cigarette and Endormie (Intimité*).

Making of the Work

Nothing is documented. The drawing is undated by the museum, unmatched in the diary, and unattached to any recorded episode.

One related but distinct idea does appear in the diary: on 27 December 1882 Marie sketches out, on going to bed, a picture she wants to make — "un homme de profil et dans l'ombre joue du piano, deux autres l'écoutent" (¶ 097.0295), one listener with his head against the base of a statue, another astride a chair with a cigarette. That is a lamp-lit interior with a man at the keyboard and is not this drawing; it is recorded here only because it shows the piano-corner interior was a composition she thought in. She never mentions it again.

References in Diary

No diary mention has been found, and none is likely to be found by title: the sheet is undated, generically titled, and one of hundreds of drawings she made without recording.

Related Entries

Sources