THE PINK DRESS

The Light of the South of France

During his short career Bazille mainly portrayed people and landscapes in natural light; he especially liked to depict the various effects of sunlight and skin tones. He shared his advocacy of open-air — plein-air — painting with his young fellow artists studying in Charles Gleyre’s Paris studio in the early 1860s, Renoir, Sisley and Monet, who later founded the Impressionist group. Although Bazille died tragically young in 1870, four years before the first Impressionist exhibition, he is regarded as one of the central figures of the movement. The four friends regularly made excursions to villages around Paris, where they painted their pictures outdoors.

Bazille painted The Pink Dress during a visit to Méric, where his family and the des Hours spent their summers together. He loved the raw light of the region, which he emphasises in his picture with powerful contrasts. The trees in the middle ground of the canvas, like Thérèse’s face, are in deep shadow, their outlines standing out sharply against the background of the sunlit village. Thérèse’s dark apron and bonnet form a sharp contrast with the vibrant pink and silver-grey stripes highlighting her light dress. These bold contrasts are characteristic features of Bazille’s art.

A Shift of Perspective

To emphasise the contrast of light and shadow and create a balanced composition, Bazille slightly altered the perspective in The Pink Dress, so that it is not entirely realistic. The house at Méric and the viewpoint lie much higher than the village, so the horizon should actually run lower, with a view onto the roofs rather than the facades. Bazille sets the middle ground within a frame of shady trees, creating the illusion of depth and bringing out the contrast between the foreground and the distant background.

This distorted perspective is even more striking in a later work by Bazille on a similar subject, View of the Village (Castelnau-le-Lez, Hérault), painted in 1868, which depicts the daughter of one of the Bazille family’s employees sitting under a tree on the edge of the Méric estate. Here too he raises the figure of the young woman above the landscape, yet the distant horizon and the course of the Lez are unnaturally high. Bazille divides the sunny foreground and the brightly lit distant background with a dark row of trees, lending the composition a sense of depth. Interestingly, in this painting the young model looks out of the picture, unlike Thérèse, who sits with her back to the viewer.

A Peaceful Scene

The figure of Thérèse contemplating the landscape radiates captivating calm and peace. The figures in Bazille’s pictures are usually motionless, wrapped in a kind of timelessness. Thérèse’s absorbed, quiet contemplation is reflected by the other elements of the painting — the only movement on this sleepy summer evening is the lazy drift of fleecy clouds across the sky and the soft rustling of the trees. The Impressionists loved to capture secret moments of solitude, and by depicting Thérèse from behind Bazille heightens the intimate atmosphere.

An Early Death

When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, Bazille joined a Zouave regiment and soon earned the rank of lieutenant. In November of that year he was killed on the battlefield near Orléans, aged only 28. His body was buried in the snow, but a few days later his father came for it and buried him in Montpellier. Bazille’s early death — at the start of a promising artistic career — was a heavy blow to those close to him.

The Pink Dress and other works passed into the possession of his elder brother, Marc Bazille, who before his death in 1924 bequeathed the picture to the French State Collection. It was first exhibited in the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, then in the Louvre, and finally in the Musée d'Orsay, the impressive home of many Impressionist paintings.