Musical accompaniment: Do You Trust Me? by Blanche

Today, I present to you two pictures from the Photo-Secession Movement: The Brass Bowl, a 1904 photograph by Edward Steichen and Miss Jones, A Portrait,  a 1901 picture by Frank Eugene.

Archive.org

I found the picture in Archive.org and I went looking for more information about it. The Met wrote up the piece like this:

Like many of Steichen’s early photographs, this image of a languid young woman with a weary gaze recalls the work of Eugène Carrière, a French Symbolist painter who was very much in vogue when Steichen first traveled to Paris to visit the 1900 Exposition Universelle and the nearby Rodin Pavillion (for which Carrière designed the poster). Steichen considered him to be “one of the greatest of modern French painters” and described his moody canvases, which usually portrayed dimly lit figures emerging from a dark field, as securing “an exquisite feeling of atmosphere and shroud[ing] that in a lovely sentiment.” It is of little consequence that the woman depicted in The Brass Bowl remains unidentified; the photograph was intended as a mood piece, not a portrait.

I have two quibbles with the description. A little quibble is good for you now and then.  The Met’s description of the model as female seems off to me. The face, neck, and hands all look like a man to me. The second quibble is with the title of the work. Doesn’t the object look more like a globe than a bowl? I suppose we’re just seeing the back of the bowl.

Hood Museum at Dartmouth University

I don’t have any information about the woman in this portrait but I’ll divine something about her. She looks confident…maybe even haughty. I imagine she had a strong personality. Jane Austen might say she was the sort of woman who “puts on airs.” She reminds me of Nancy Reagan a little bit. Not that they look alike but they’re both petite women who give the impression of being very particular, proper, and controlling.

The pictures have some similarities but the biggest difference is, as the Met noted, the first picture is not a portrait. The model, whoever he (or she) is, is not the focus but one element of a composition, whereas Miss Jones was clearly the subject and focus of her portrait. I bet she was the subject and focus of anything she was part of!