#pastel on paper

[garv-painter]

Lindsey harald wong. Pastels on paper

[fyblackwomenart]

Red Flowers by Inna Medvedeva

[marejadilla]

Nathalie Venant, “Nuage” 2023, pastel on paper. b. 1960, Saint Doulchard, France.

[webrelic]

Jinhee Lee (2022)

[lionofchaeronea]

The Detective, József Rippl-Rónai, 1923

[life-imitates-art-far-more]

Lilla Cabot Perry (1848-1933) "Japanese boy with headband" (1901) Pastel on paper Impressionism

[galleryofart]

The Yellow Sail

Artist: Odilon Redon (French, 1840-1916)

Date: c. 1905

Style: Symbolism

Medium: Pastel on paper

Collection: Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana

Description

Symbolist artist Odilon Redon created images that suggest mental states or spiritual realms rather than imitations of the visible world. While Redon was fascinated by recent scientific discoveries relating to the sea, this glowing pastel may have a more mystical inspiration. Does it refer to the final journey of the soul, symbolized by the gems, across the divide between life and death? The two women could be spiritual presences who attend the soul as guardian figures.

Redon's art was part of a broader European current that included Sigmund Freud's analysis of dreams and the founding of modern psychology.

[from-a-spiders-web]

The Lavergne family breakfast, 1754 Jean-Etienne Liotard

[de-mykel]

Sasha Yosselyani. Transfiguration 2, 2023.

soft pastel on pastel paper

[artsandculture]

Waiting (1882) 🎨 Edgar Degas 🏛️ The J. Paul Getty Museum 📍 Los Angeles, United States

A young ballet dancer bends forward to massage her foot, while her somberly dressed older companion sits silently beside her on a bench. They appear to be waiting, perhaps for an audition or its outcome. The two figures are a study in contrasts: The athletic dancer dressed in a dazzling costume reflects the glamour and artifice of the stage, while the shabbily dressed, bent figure represents the drabness of everyday life.

Edgar Degas painted modern life; his subjects, including laundresses, milliners, nightclub singers, horse races, and the ballet, reflected contemporary Parisian occupations and diversions. From the 1860s onward, Degas frequented the Paris Opéra, where he made numerous studies of performances, rehearsals, and backstage scenes. Later, he would refine and combine these motifs in his studio, in exercises of daring technical skill and compelling psychological subtlety. Here he demonstrated his complete mastery of the pastel technique. Delicately blended strokes are combined with bold hatching and emphatic slashes; pink, blue, and creamy tones describe the dancer in contrast to the dark, severe form of the older woman.

[fyblackwomenart]

Lupita by Inna Medvedeva

[eirene]

Woman Seated Holding Lilies, 1902

James Wells Champney

[webrelic]

Francisca Feuerhake

[lionofchaeronea]

Portrait of a Young Girl, Rosalba Carriera (1675-1757)

[kestarren]

"Le marchand de poteries ~ The pottery merchant" by Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer. French artist 1865-1953.

[galleryofart]

A Woman in Turkish Costume in a Hamam Instructing a Servant

Artist: Jean-Etienne Liotard (Genevan, 1702-1789)

Date: 18th century

Medium: pastel on paper, laid down on canvas

Collection: Private collection

Description

The subject is a lady and her servant, standing beside the kurna, the stone wash basin that is found at the entrance to the hottest part of a Turkish bath, the calidarium, where visitors to the baths would begin the process of washing, before entering the baths themselves. They are both extremely elaborately dressed, the tips of their fingers coloured with the traditional henna that the servant carries in the pot on her tray, alongside a double-sided ivory comb, but the lady must in fact have been a European – possibly Greek, Jewish, Armenian or ���Frankish’ (a term generally applied at the time to people originating from Northern European countries such as France, England or Holland); Liotard would not have had access to Muslim women. The lady’s heavy costume consists of no fewer than five distinct layers, and would surely have been far too hot to be worn inside the baths, though the tall wooden slippers with blue embroidered bands (takunya) are indeed what she and her servant would have worn into this part of the baths, to avoid burning their feet on the heated stones.

The costume is, however, consistent with how a Turkish woman would have been dressed in preparation for a traditional pre-marriage visit to the baths.  Only on that occasion would she go to the baths dressed in garments such as the white fur waistcoat embroidered with gold threads that we see here, with a string of gold coins around her neck (one side bearing the first line of the Koran, the other the official monogram of the Sultan), and other lavish gold and silk adornments. The virtuosic depiction of this extremely elaborate costume therefore takes on something of an ethnographic function, as a faithful record of an important aspect of Turkish culture and customs – a very different function from the more contrived portraits in exotic costume that made up so much of Liotard’s output during his time in Constantinople.  Even the colour scheme, with the intense opulence of the costumes set against a rather misty, greyish-brown background with only the faintest of shadows, somehow mimics the visual effect of seeing these sumptuously dressed figures through the steamy atmosphere of the baths, further emphasising that this is a snapshot not so much of the individual people as of the location and the specific event.