This picture is not a portrait likeness but a tête d’expression intended to evoke a particular state of mind. Invented in the seventeenth century, the tête d’expression remained a common academic exercise two hundred years later, when Couture used this study to capture the distinctly modern mental state of an alluring adolescent daydreamer. Though he had earned his reputation with grand historical and religious paintings, the artist here adopted a casual, fluid manner to describe what one critic called the “harmonious disorder” of his model’s hair and clothing, her “ravishing air of melancholy.” Couture’s têtes d’expression inspired more radical works both by his contemporary (and arch-enemy) Gustave Courbet and by his own great pupil, Édouard Manet.
Details
- Artist Name: Thomas Couture (French, 1815-1879)
- Title: Reverie
- Date: 1840-1841
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Dimensions: 21-5/8 x 20-1/2 in. (54.9 x 52.1 cm)
- Credit Line: Norton Simon Art Foundation, from the Estate of Jennifer Jones Simon
- Accession Number: M.2010.1.199.P
- Copyright: © Norton Simon Art Foundation
Object Information
[M. Knoedler & Co., New York, stock 6646, sold 22 November 1890, as Tête de femme, to];
The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C. (sale, New York, Sotheby Parke Bernet, 3 May 1979, lot 58, to);
Norton Simon, by bequest to;
Jennifer Jones Simon Art Trust, to;
Norton Simon Art Foundation.
Salon
- Paris, 1841-03-15 to
[on loan]
- Santa Fe, Museum of New Mexico, 1959-07-01 to 1959-08-13
Academic Painting
- Lexington, University of Kentucky Art Gallery, 1973-10-21 to 1973-11-11
Six Centuries of Portraiture from the Permanent Collection
- Norton Simon Museum, 1989-11-02 to 1990-12-16
Gaze: Portraiture After Ingres
- Norton Simon Museum, 2009-10-30 to 2010-04-05
- Corcoran Gallery of Art, Catalogue of the Paintings in the Corcoran Gallery of Art, p. 58
- Corcoran Gallery of Art, Illustrated Handbook of Paintings, Sculpture and Other Art Objects, 1939,
- Brettell, Richard R. and Stephen F. Eisenman, Nineteenth-Century Art in the Norton Simon Museum, volume 1, 2006,
- Campbell, Sara, Collector Without Walls: Norton Simon and His Hunt for the Best, 2010, cat. 1598 p. 425
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