Francisco INGLADA - Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt as Camille in La Dame aux Camélias

Francisco INGLADA
Barcelona, 1850 - 1903
Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt as Camille in La Dame aux Camélias
Oil on canvas
56 x 43 cm (74 x 62 cm with frame)
Signed upper left "Inglada".
Beautiful carved wood frame

Here, Francisco Inglada has painted the great Sarah Bernhardt in her famous role as Camille Gautier in "La Dame aux Camélias", which she performed in Madrid at the Teatro Real during her 1882 tour of Spain. The beautiful young Sarah Bernhardt's hair falls over her face, and her profile features a recognizable mouth and nose. In the role of the beautiful courtesan, Sarah Bernhardt wears a scruffy outfit with Camellias in her hair.
The young Inglada would later leave for Paris, like so many other Catalan artists in the 1880s attracted by the Capital of the Arts.
Francisco Inglada was one of those painters who came to work in Paris in the 1880s, like Francisco Parera (in the 1880s) and Eliséo Meifren (in 1879). In 1886, the influential Figaro critic Albert Wolff described Paris as "the capital of the arts", adding: "It is in art that Paris, after its disasters, has found the renewal of its European situation. [...] No sooner had the siege of Paris ended, than foreign dealers rushed to the capital", for "nowhere could one assemble such a large collection of men who have marked the luminous phases of art".
Inglada painted portraits and genre scenes, such as "A Lesson" (shown at the Barcelona Fine Arts Exhibition of 1880), "A Study from Nature" (1871, awarded an honorable mention), "A Gypsy and a Gypsy Woman" (Girona Exhibition, 1878), or "A Lady Walking in the Country", "A Lady Seated in a Garden", as well as Andalusian scenes in costume.

Ref: Z7C11FM5ZJ