Matinee de printemps

Accession Number
2005/2.33

Title
Matinee de printemps

Artist(s)
James Jacques Joseph Tissot

Artist Nationality
French (culture or style)

Object Creation Date
1875

Medium & Support
drypoint on paper

Dimensions
19 15/16 in x 10 15/16 in (50.64 cm x 27.78 cm);22 11/16 in x 15 3/16 in (57.63 cm x 38.58 cm)

Credit Line
Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Robert Aldrich

Subject matter
This genre scene, or image of everyday life, centers on the depiction of a fashoinable bourgeois woman caught during a sudden shift in the pleasant spring morning weather.
The image can be placed within a long visual tradition of deocrative allegorical images in which women are used to represent the four seasons. In a related allegorical reading, contemporaries might have seen the change in the weather depicted in the print as analogous to the supposed quickness with which women's moods were thought to shift.

Physical Description
A woman in an elaborate striped dress stands in an outdoor landscape, shading her eyes with her right hand and looking directly out at the viewer. She holds a white umbrella that dramatically frames her head (capped by a white hat) against the dark sky in the upper background of the composition. A contrasting white area of ground beneath the black sky leads into the foreground, where the woman stands at the edge of a pond surrounded by reeds and a large stalked plant.  
Signed in the image, lower left, in the plate: "J.J. Tissot / 1875"

Primary Object Classification
Print

Primary Object Type
intaglio print

Collection Area
Western

Rights
If you are interested in using an image for a publication, please visit http://umma.umich.edu/request-image for more information and to fill out the online Image Rights and Reproductions Request Form.

Keywords
cattail (material)
costume (mode of fashion)
drypoint (printing process)
etching (printing process)
gardens (open spaces)
genre (visual works)
hats
original prints
parasols (costume accessories)
ponds (water)
reed (plant)
seasons
storms
sunlight
umbrellas
women (female humans)

1 Related Resource

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Associated Artists
(Part of: Artist Associations and Art Movements)

& Author Notes

All Rights Reserved