Women & Elegant Figures

The women of this series almost always have something to do. An eighteenth-century lady sits at a small fortepiano with the score open, another plays a harp on a gilded column, a third draws the bow across a cello. Music runs through the series as insistently as period dress.

Reading and letters are the second constant. A young woman reclines on a striped chaise longue reading a note; another sits with a book of verse, an aigrette in her hair; a third waits in a gilt-trimmed armchair holding a folded parasol and a handkerchief.

Costume dates each scene better than any caption: full eighteenth-century ball gowns, a shawl and high coiffure with a rose, silhouettes of the early nineteen hundreds, art deco in «Tango», where the pair holds mid-step.

There are outdoor pieces too: a lady in a hat beside a borzoi, a girl with a swan and duckling in the grass, a scene by a flower basket with a spaniel at hand. The Capodimonte porcelain figurine here is occupied by an action, not a pose.