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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.

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