Oil Painting, 'Interior with Two Women Examining Cloth', Théophile Emmanuel Duverger, 3rd quarter of the 19th century

Two women in nineteenth-century dress in an interior, examining a large piece of fabric; , a landscape painting hang above a piano with sheets of music in the background.

Bequeathed by Joshua Dixon

Bequeathed by Joshua Dixon, 1886

Historical significance: This painting is a typical example of the kind of charming and unchallenging imagery that developed under the Second republic and Second Empire in France.
It shows a humble woman dressed in black presenting a large piece of fabric to an elegant woman seated in an armchair in a bourgeois interior. Duverger specialised in this kind of pictures for which he is now best known.
These scenes of domestic life proved quite popular to the bourgeois audience at the time, eager to forget the aftermaths of the Revolution of 1848. These compositions result from the combination of a new interest of domestic subject appeared in the Realist movement, which emerged in the 1840s, and the revival of genre scenes, influenced by the 17th-century Dutch imagery.
Comparable works include The Music Lesson, National Academy of Design, New York, and Best Friends, Private collection.

'Genre painting' describes scenes of everyday life set in domestic interiors or in the countryside, especially those produced by 17th-century Dutch painters such as Gerard ter Borch, Jan Steen, and Pieter de Hooch. These subjects were not particularly popular with Italian and French artists before the 18th century. Even then, Italian genre painting is mainly restricted to works produced by Northern artists active in Bologna and the Veneto such as Giuseppe Maria Crespi (1665-1747), Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (1682-1754), Pietro Longhi (ca. 1701-1785) and Giacomo Ceruti (1698-1767). In this pre-Enlightment society, issues of social class, the legitimacy of power and the needs of common people were beginning to be discussed in Holland, England and France and the debates were slowly filtering down to Italy. Bolognese intellectual life was particularly active and Crespi, who was corresponding one of the most notable academics, Antonio Muratori (1672-1750), appears to have created a visual response to these debates. The works of the Bamboccianti, mostly Netherlandish painters specialising in low-life paintings, painted in Rome in the mid 17th century, may also have provided a source for Italian genre painters while the commedia dell'arte profoundly inspired Crespi and the development of this new Italian version of genre painting. From Bologna the genre spread to Venice thanks to Venetians artists such as Piazzetta and Longhi. They drew the attention of foreign collectors, most notably Joseph Smith the British Consul in Venice, who amassed an impressive collection of such artworks and of Venetian art in general and contributed to the growing taste for these in England. In France, the genre was mainly introduced in the second quarter of the 17th century by the Le Nain brothers, especially Antoine and Louis, whose works still pose problems of individual identification. Genre paintings would be reactivated during the 19th century when artists such as Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) whose art was based on the impartial observation of contemporary life.

Théophile-Emmanuel Duverger (1821-c. 1901) was born in Bordeaux. He was an autodidact who trained himself by copying the great masters in galleries. He settled in Ecouen where an art colony had been started by Pierre Edouard Frère (1819-1886), a former pupil of Paul Delaroche (1797-1856). He started exhibiting at the Salon in 1846.

This painting is a fine example of Duverger's genre scenes, a category for which he is now best known. His art ranges from charming scenes of domestic life to works concentrating on the idleness of a more bourgeois world. This is the case here with the depiction of a luxury domestic interior with a elegantly dressed woman examining a large piece of fabric presented by a dressmaker. This peaceful scene is characteristic of the works that Duverger produced from the 1860s onwards.

1074-1886