Beauty

Henri Martin painted this tall figure of Beauty in 1900, the year Paris hosted its great Universal Exhibition and Art Nouveau was everywhere, in the new metro entrances and the curling ironwork of the streets. He showed the canvas at the Salon that same year. Martin had trained in the sober academic manner, but by now he worked in small flecks of pure colour, a pointillist touch he used to make light shimmer across the surface. A magistrate named Paul Riff bought it straight from the artist's studio and went on to gather a large collection of his work. Riff's daughter gave this painting to the museum in Toulouse in 1963, the city where Martin had first trained as a young man.