Interior with a Portrait of a Young Lady Before a Bust 1788

Curator: Oh, this is striking. So fragile, almost like a dream. There's such drama to the gesture, like she's caught mid-aria. Editor: That’s precisely the effect Claude Jean-Baptiste Hoin aimed for in his 1788 work, "Interior with a Portrait of a Young Lady Before a Bust." It really exemplifies the shift towards Romanticism in French art. It is currently held here at The Art Institute of Chicago. Curator: Romanticism, yes, the drama certainly conveys that. Look at how she holds that letter. Is she reading it or casting it away? The white bird about to take flight mirrors her possible transformation and it contrasts deeply against the stark colors behind. Editor: Exactly, the artist used mixed media -- gouache and watercolor over a counterproof in graphite or black chalk on paper, very typical in academic settings for preliminary works, to emulate texture in what we may believe to be satin, wood and marble textures . The papers themselves act like ephemeral messages, almost like thoughts taking flight from the lady’s mind, each carefully positioned to provoke an idea in the spectator’s head. Curator: I see how he layered symbolism, those visual metaphors really draw you in. The bust, is it a lover? A muse? What does she yearn for that seems perpetually just out of her reach? Editor: What you read as a personal yearning can also be considered in a wider social sense: there was intense disruption as the aristocracy became uprooted by new social mobility, leading people to question norms. Even the seemingly innocuous detail of musical instruments—the harp, the guitar— speaks to a life disrupted and maybe even an ended leisure. Curator: You know, looking closer, I appreciate how Hoin captured that sense of unease and longing. Editor: He distilled that uncertainty of a precise historical moment into very delicate emotional signifiers. I'm constantly amazed by the enduring power of those symbols that are present through time.