Jeanne JACQUEMIN (1863-1938) - Lot 40

Jeanne JACQUEMIN (1863-1938) Woman with crown Pastel on laid paper Size: 57 x 33.5 cm Signed lower left It is likely that our pastel is the one exhibited in 1893 by Le Barc de Boutteville at the 5th Impressionist and Symbolist Painters Exhibition, from October 25 to November 5, 1893, under the title "La couronne de douleur" ("The Crown of Sorrow"). Pastel is a recurrent medium in the work of Jeanne Jacquemin, whose works are very rare on the market. Indeed, her participation in various exhibitions (at Le Barc de Boutteville from 1892 to 1900, at the Union des femmes peintres et sculpteurs in 1889, and at the Salon des XX in Brussels in 1893) records just 46 works (at least two of them exhibited several times). If we add the 14 later paintings exhibited at the Dijon Salon between 1902 and 1938, the corpus of works listed seems to be limited to around sixty. Jeanne Jacquemin is a mythical artist, adulated by her artist friends, but her work remains to be discovered, and must be, so much so that the pastel we are presenting today is imbued with all the hallmarks of Symbolism. Here, as in most known pastels, is a self-portrait in which the artist depicts herself in close-up, mid-body, against a backdrop of an indefinite dreamlike landscape, the color of the sky announcing the finiteness of the day, a Christ-like crown of thorns floating around her head. The light-blue gaze is surrounded by shadows, the face inexpressive as if frozen in a distant expression. The long, loose blond hair brushes against the iris flower held in her hands off-camera. A few diagonal strokes from top to bottom could evoke a transparent veil, and add to the poetic mystery of this work. Two small old tears without loss of support in the lower right near the edge. The laid paper is not fully glued to the cardboard of the old frame.