A portrait of a girl in a white dress 

Pascal-Adolphe-Jean Dagnan-Bouveret painted this portrait of a girl in a white dress, using oil, sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century. It's a study in innocence, but the way innocence is portrayed always comes loaded with social meaning. Made in France, this image speaks to the complex politics surrounding the representation of women at that time. Consider the setting: nature, and the young girl, perhaps on the cusp of womanhood, holding a piece of fruit. It calls to mind classical allegories, but also the ways women were often framed as part of nature, outside of culture. What does it mean for a woman to be innocent, and who gets to define that innocence? The visual codes and cultural references here are far from simple, even though the image is composed to appear as such. To better understand the artwork, we need to know a bit more about its history, by researching the artist, and the context in which he lived and worked. The meaning of art depends on the social and institutional contexts in which it is made and viewed.