Allegory of pain

In the early 1890s a French painter had two very different places to show. One was the Salon des Artistes Français, official and state-backed. The other was the Salon de la Rose+Croix, run by the writer Joséphin Péladan, who wanted mystical subjects and ruled out ordinary modern life altogether. Henri Martin showed at both. He joined Péladan's salons from 1892 with figures wrapped in dark veils, and in 1894 he sent this mourning woman to the official Salon. She stands in profile, veiled in black, carrying a globe of light in her hands. The flecked, broken brushwork comes out of Seurat and the divisionists, the hushed frieze-like pose out of Puvis de Chavannes, the muralist whose pale figures filled French public buildings in those years. Martin kept working the same vein through the decade, with Virtue in 1895 and Silence in 1897.