Pair of Art Nouveau nymphs

Pair of Art Nouveau nymphs. France, early 20th century.
Polychrome terracotta.
Measurements: 41 cm (height).
Pair of terracotta busts of two young women of fine beauty. Their elegant features denote a certain classical idealisation, although their expressiveness, contained and emotive, is typical of the fin-de-siècle period. They represent two of the muses of Art Nouveau, whose aesthetic lasted into the 20th century: the ethereal nymph who lives immersed in nature. In Art Nouveau, influenced by Symbolist literature, women are considered to be beings of transformation and metamorphosis, and for this reason they are often depicted with extreme fantasy, being associated with the supernatural and the unknown. The feminine is intimately associated with the hidden part of nature, with the mysterious and therefore attractive and seductive. The fragile woman, with narrow shoulders and a stylised figure, like a nymph or sylph, lures men inexorably towards perdition. She is thus conceived as a contradictory figure, exotic and weak in appearance but demonic in essence. Here, however, the woman does not look directly at the viewer, luring the man to his destruction with her irresistible gaze. On the contrary, she is lost in her own thoughts, unaware of our gaze and therefore unreachable, as if she belonged to another world, the world of the mysterious, the world of dreams, the dark side of nature. She is therefore the personification of an ideal, but she is at the same time a fully corporeal figure, magnificently modelled in her anatomy and her movements, endowed with great elegance and gracefulness, and also possessing a marked personality, as revealed by that "mal du siécle" which we can see in her melancholy face, in her bowed head.