Young Girl of Amalfi La jeune fille d'Amalfi

Date

1895

Creator

One of Aman-Jean's most distinctive specialities was his idealized images of enigmatic, sensual, and yet quintessentially remote women. The Museum's pastel, with its intensely vivid colors of contrasting golds, blues, and oranges and vigorously applied strokes of chalk, can plausibly be dated to about 1895. Depicting a woman caught with her arms raised in a moment of reverie, surrounded by an arbor covered with vines and flowers, the drawing seems to coincide with a pastel the artist entitled 'Fille d'Amalfi'. Two other studies for that composition are in the Musée d'Orsay and the Musée Baron Martin, in Gray, France. The style of this evocative image suggests the influence of Symbolism and Art Nouveau. The woman's exotic appearance and the somewhat mysterious setting are emblematic of the decorative, luxuriant, and equivocal qualities of much of Aman-Jean's art. from Spiro, Nineteenth-Century French Drawings (Notre Dame, 2007)