In a simple bare room, featuring only three objects, a sofa, a full-length mirror and a picture on the wall, a young woman stands in quiet contemplation of her appearance. The austerity of the room is matched by the subdued tonality and limited, rather silvery palette, punctuated only by the reddish brown of the sofa, the model’s hair, the brown and gilt of the mirror. She wears a striped dress with an overdress of a pale grey, tied in a bow at the waist with a black fringed scarf. Her hair is piled up with one plait at the back. She holds her hands together, grasping a small red flower, the only touch of bright colour in the picture.
Depictions of young women at their mirror were popular among the Impressionist painters, and treated by both French: Manet, Edouard (1832 - 1883) and French: Morisot, Berthe (1841 - 1895). Such images can be placed in a much longer tradition of depictions of women at their toilette, often presented in the guise of Venus, the personification of female beauty, admiring herself in a mirror, as in Spanish: Velázquez, Diego, The Toilet of Venus (‘The Rokeby Venus’) (NG2057). Many such images play on the theme of vanity, where women, engaged in self-contemplation, even self-admiration, are observed in images which may border on the voyeuristic. Such a sense of vanity is missing from this portrayal of critical and modest self-appraisal.
It is probable that Gonzalès painted this in around 1869‒70, after she had left the studio of Charles Chaplin, and started as Manet’s only formal pupil. The handling is broad and generally unmodulated, with the folds on her overdress starkly rendered. Her face, lit from the right, is delicately modelled in light and shadow in shades of grey-brown, matching the grisaille of the picture on the wall, perhaps a reproductive print. This subtle monochrome modelling, which appears to be unique in her own work, is reminiscent of Manet’s work from the 1860s, which would have been present in his studio at this period. The young woman is Gonzalès’s younger sister Jeanne, her constant model throughout her career, and also an artist in her own right. As opportunities for painting professional models in public spaces could be restricted for women at this period, being able to rely on family members was crucial for artists such as Gonzalès. This painting exemplifies the type of domestic subject matter which was in many ways the limit of their permitted sphere of activity. In such a studied portrayal of a single figure Gonzalès was already applying lessons learned from both Chaplin and Manet to her consummate portrayals of the quiet spirit of bourgeois life.
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