Portrait of Mademoiselle Cécile Glace

The Musée d'Orsay gives this portrait no date, only that it was painted before 1914. Her clothes offer a hint. The black dress has the enormous puffed sleeves that Paris fashion favoured in the mid-1890s, a high collar, and a small bunch of pink roses and yellow sprigs pinned at the breast. She stands with one hand on her chest and the other on her hip, looking away to one side, against a plain brown ground. Who Cécile Glace was, the catalogue records do not say. The canvas came to the State in 1914 as a bequest from the lawyer and collector Paul-Arthur Chéramy. His bequest also brought in Dinet's portrait of Chéramy himself, now on loan to the Bardo museum in Tunis, and a plaster bust of Cécile Glace, also by Dinet, went from his estate to the fine arts museum in Angers.