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@mdstamper.bsky.social Oct 11, 2026, 3:26 PM

“Jove decadent. Després del ball” (Decadent Young Woman. After the Ball) by Ramon Casas (Spanish) – Oil on canvas / 1899 – Museu de Montserrat (Montserrat, Spain) #WomenInArt #RamonCasas #Casas #MuseudeMontserrat #art #artText #arte #CatalanArt #Modernisme #FinDeSiecle #SpanishArt #1890sArt

A woman has collapsed across a green sofa, her body stretched almost diagonally from one end to the other. Spanish artist Ramon Casas makes exhaustion the subject of “Jove decadent. Després del ball.” The woman’s black dress spreads heavily across the cushions and toward the floor, while one arm hangs loosely over the sofa’s edge. Her head sinks into a pillow, her face turned away from us, and the loose arrangement of her reddish-brown hair adds to the sense that formal appearances no longer matter. Only a small yellow booklet in her raised hand interrupts the scene.

The woman was Madeleine Boisguillaume, a Parisian model who appears in several works associated with Casas and his circle. Here she is neither standing for inspection nor performing a carefully controlled social pose. Instead, Casas catches her in a private moment after the excitement of a dance. Her elongated body, dangling hand, and almost boneless posture communicate physical fatigue immediately. Yet the pose also feels strikingly modern. She occupies the sofa completely, taking up space without attempting to present herself gracefully for us.

Casas painted the work in Paris in 1899, during a period when he moved between the French capital and Barcelona and became one of the leading figures associated with Catalan Modernisme. Later that year, the painting appeared in Barcelona in a monographic exhibition connected with Pèl & Ploma, the influential art and literary magazine Casas helped create.

Within the turn-of-the-century atmosphere of the fin de siècle blurring languor, sophistication, nightlife, and unconventional behavior, Boisguillaume does not look morally ruined or dramatically tragic. She simply looks spent. Against the vivid green upholstery, her black silhouette is both elegant and wonderfully unguarded. The painting turns a moment after dancing has stopped and social performance has temporarily fallen away into its own kind of memory.

@mdstamper.bsky.social Oct 9, 2026, 4:33 PM

“Summer” by Thomas Wilmer Dewing (American) - Oil on canvas / 1890 - Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, Connecticut) #WomenInArt #YaleUniversityArtGallery #Tonalism #AmericanArt #art #artText #yale #1890sArt #ThomasDewing #ThomasWilmerDewing #summer #arte #AmericanArtist #YaleUniversity

Four young women move hand in hand across a dark green landscape while a fifth, dressed in vivid red, sits at the right playing a harp. Their long evening gowns of muted gold, rose, brown, pink, and red form a sequence of color against a shadowed ground. Dewing elongates their bodies and simplifies their faces, so the women are less individual portraits than a measured procession. Slender birch trunks rise behind them in pale verticals, echoing the women’s upright forms, while their linked arms create a gentle horizontal rhythm that carries the eye across the canvas.

Painted in Cornish, New Hampshire, in 1890, “Summer” belongs to the dreamy, atmospheric mode for which American artist Thomas Wilmer Dewing became known. Yale notes his interest in James McNeill Whistler, Asian design, and music, all of which help explain the painting’s unusual stillness and sense of arrangement. The women’s movement has often been described not as an energetic dance, but a controlled sequence of poses. The harp reinforces the musical structure of the composition, suggesting that Dewing was thinking about harmony not only as sound, but as an organizing principle for color, line, and spacing.

The scene is idealized, but its women are not simply decorative accessories to the landscape. Their linked bodies command the center of the picture, and their coordinated movement gives them a collective presence. At the same time, Dewing withholds narrative clues like who they are, where they are going, or what relation binds them. That ambiguity allows the painting to hover between social scene, allegory, and dream. In the rapidly industrializing America of the late 19th century, such a cultivated, suspended world would have felt deliberately removed from modern urban life.

“Summer” ultimately depends less on story than on the tension between motion and stillness with women moving through a landscape that seems almost motionless while their bodies turn music into a line.