La châtelaine

By 1875 France had neither king nor emperor. The Second Empire had fallen with the war of 1870, the Paris Commune had been crushed, and the country was settling into the sober new Third Republic. Monticelli was painting none of that. Five years earlier he had walked the 752 kilometres from Paris home to Marseille to escape the Franco-Prussian War, and there, poor but tireless, he kept conjuring a world that had already vanished. La châtelaine is one of those reveries: the lady of a manor in a park, dressed for a courtly afternoon closer to Watteau's 18th century than to anything in republican France. He returned to this kind of fête galante again and again, each panel a variation on the same imagined leisure. She barely resolves into a face, built from thick strokes of pigment that stand off the small panel, so her finery registers as much as texture as costume.