European school; c. 1860.

European school; c. 1860.
"Portrait of a lady".
Oil on canvas.
Preserves period frame.
Measurements: 80 x 61 cm; 95 x 75 cm (frame).
Female portrait in which the protagonist is shown facing the viewer and long bust as usual in the portraiture of the time. However, in this case the young woman has her hands crossed in front of her chest and her face slightly tilted, so that it offers the viewer an image of broad psychological charge where the protagonist sweetens her personality through her gesture.
In the 19th century, the panorama of the European portrait is varied and broad, with numerous influences and largely determined by the taste of both the clientele and the painter himself. However, this century saw the birth of a new concept of portraiture, which would evolve throughout the century and unify all the national schools: the desire to capture the personality of the human being and his character, beyond his external reality and his social rank, in his effigy. During the previous century, portraiture had become consolidated among the upper classes, and was no longer reserved only for the court. For this reason the formulas of the genre, as the eighteenth century progressed and even more so in the nineteenth century, would relax and move away from the ostentatious and symbolic official representations typical of the Baroque apparatus.