Louise Abbéma’s Portrait of a Young Girl with a Blue Ribbon demonstrates the influence of Impressionism on her style, as well as her skill with pastels. Unblended strokes of pastel crayon, particularly in the girl’s dress, work together to suggest the texture of the blue material, rather than rendering it in fine detail. In certain areas, Abbéma lets the blank canvas show through, an effect often used by Impressionist artists such as Berthe Morisot.

   Abbéma’s frank and un-sentimentalized portrayal of her sitter is unusual in her oeuvre; her most typical subjects are genre scenes, allegories, and portraits of women.

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Louise Abbéma was a French Impressionist painter, decorative artist, and engraver. Born into a wealthy family that moved among prominent art circles, Abbéma was destined to be an artist. It was uncommon for women to attend art academies at the time, so Abbéma studied under notable artists such as Charles Chaplin, Jean-Jacques Henner, and Émile-Auguste Carolus-Duran. At age 16, she exhibited a painting of her mother at the Paris Salon, but it was her full-length portrait of Sarah Bernhardt exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1876 that garnered national attention. Abbéma executed multiple portraits and a bronze medallion of the actress, with whom she was a close friend and possibly lover. Abbéma’s early works were mostly portraits of costumed actors and actresses at the Comédie Française. Her rapid brushstrokes and light touch deftly captured the spirit of her sitters. Her high-profile sitters included French diplomat and engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps, Emperor Pedro I of Brazil, and architect Charles Garnier.

From 1881, Abbéma’s work demonstrated an influence of Japanese painting and an increasing portrayal of flowers and animals. Abbéma developed a variety of techniques using oil paints, pastel, and watercolor, and worked on various supports including fans. Her genre scenes and indoor and outdoor group scenes were often exhibited at the Salon. Abbéma received several commissions for decorative panels for town halls throughout Paris and the Palace of the Governor of Dakar in Senegal. Other commissions in Paris included “Gismonda and the Woman of Samaria,” 1904, and “Magpie,” 1907, for the Theatre Sarah Bernhardt, “Joan of Arc,” 1914, for the church of Notre-Dame de Lorette, and allegorical subjects for the Musée de l’Armée and the hall of the National Horticultural Society of France. Abbéma contributed regularly to journals such as the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, L’Art and L’Art et la Mode, and provided engravings for René Maizeroy’s La Mer. She solidified her international recognition after exhibiting at the Women’s Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Abbéma continued to exhibit at the Salon until 1926.

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