Centaur Woman 

Alphonse Legros made this drawing of a Centaur Woman using pen and brown ink over graphite. The figure is presented in an imaginary landscape with an unusual combination of naturalistic detail and mythological fantasy. Legros made this drawing around the turn of the century, a time in which the question of what was 'real' was being asked in philosophy, science, and art. The image hints at the social and cultural anxieties in fin-de-siècle Europe. The visual codes of academic art are very present, but here, the artist gives us an explicitly mythological subject in contrast to the taste of the academies of art, which favoured allegories. To understand this period and the debates around the politics of imagery, we could research art journals and exhibition reviews of the time. The meaning of art is always contingent on its social and institutional context.