by The following short essay is about a painting by Louis Anquetin. Because this is not an especially well-known painting, I encourage the reader to first study the painting long enough to form their own opinion and interpretation.
On the eighth of July 20231, I went to the Art Institute of Chicago and saw a painting that caught my eye. In the back of the impressionist wing, the painting by Louis Anquetin usually called Élégante de profil au Bal Mabille2 caught my eye. Because the impressionist wing, by the style’s nature, doesn’t have very many figures painted with great precision, I was first stricken by the detail of the central woman: the composition of the painting immediately draws the viewer to the anonymous woman’s face, especially given its striking but ambiguous expression. As I continued to examine the painting, the sense of vivid detail and clarity faded. The woman’s visible hand seems but a sketch of itself, the proportions of her torso don’t seem quite right, and this is to say nothing of the background; the other figures at the ball have a spectral quality, as if they are mere “presences” intruding on the scene that rightfully belongs to the aptly eponymous elegant woman. Furthermore, the woman’s hat seems in some sense to blend into the background at its rear thanks to its fine floral adornment. After some time (I honestly couldn’t say if it was while I was looking at the painting or as much as a few days later), I began to cohere this information into an interpretation of the painting: it is not a painting of the woman, it is a painting of the experience of seeing the woman. One can imagine that Anquetin, struck by the sight of the woman, remembered her face and her costume in detail, but that that memory dominated the scene, reducing the background to a ghost of the scene itself. Because the woman is anonymous, I’d like to imagine (let’s be clear — with no evidence whatsoever) that Anquetin, haunted by the memory of this woman, painted this as a form of closure. I think this phenomenological interpretation of the painting is valid and maybe to some degree interesting, but, if that’s where my saga with this painting had stopped, I probably wouldn’t be writing this.
Some time later, remembering this painting, of which I thought to note neither name nor artist, I sought to look it up. I used every tool I could think of to find out about the painting: search engines both of the traditional and of the new LLM-powered types, AIC’s website showing their collection, internet resources about impressionist art (mostly but certainly not exclusively scouring wikipedia), and even purchasing a copy of the Art Institute’s Essential Guide3 to see if the painting was detailed therein. Unfortunately, none of these inquiries bore fruit; I was stuck only with my memory of the painting. It then occurred to me that the experience I had with the painting was, in fact, the same experience that the painting itself sought to capture: I remembered the central woman’s face, and a few of the details (the red dress, the ghastly background figures, the stylistic qualities), but was woefully short of the full picture. Anquetin’s anonymous woman became my anonymous painting — striking but ephemeral, more an impression than a concrete object or event in memory — and it was this experience that grew my appreciation for the painting, which I now consider among my favorites.
While I certainly don’t expect anyone who didn’t have this experience to confidently name it as one of their favorite paintings, hopefully this interpretation has offered you a new way of looking at this overlooked and underappreciated painting. Thankfully, my experience differed from Anquetin’s in one important way: I went back to the Art Institute a few months later when next I went to Chicago and was able to fill in all the gaps, or at least enough of them to write this.
- Incidentally, my birthday. ↩︎
- I have seen a couple titles for this painting in French and therefore there is no standard name for this painting in English. The placard in AIC calls it An Elegant Woman at the Élysée Montmartre and contains brief historical information, but nothing relating to the interpretation I lay out here. ↩︎
- It appears this book is no longer sold by AIC. Several similar options can be found on their site, though I imagine that they too fail to mention the Anquetin piece in question. ↩︎
This is the first of several essays I’m intending to write about aesthetic interpretations of various works I found in some way striking or memorable. Please follow my blog if you are interested and feel free to send any constructive feedback.
Daniel Chevallier 
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