Auguste-Alexandre Hirsch

Paris, Salon, 1875, no. 1056

Lined, widely patterned craquelure throughout; under UV: inpainting to address 10 inch horizontal repaired tear through her lower leg, 5 inch horizontal repaired tear through her left arm, some dots and dashes of inpainting in her forearm, vertical repaired tear to left side of her head, dots and dashes of inpainting to flowers to left of her head, inpainting to vertical repaired tear extending along left side from top to bottom and inpainting to horizontal repaired tear extending across bottom from left to right.
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Hirsch's artistic career was marked by diversity. Beginning in 1857, when Hirsh debuted at age twenty-four, the artist's early submissions to the Paris Salons included portraits as well as religious, genre and historical subjects. A visit to Morocco in 1870 inspired his mature period and its focus on the women in and around the community of Tetuán. This study of "exotic" women may have informed the present work of an alluring figure stretched across a gauzy white cloud, her jet-black hair flowing across a midnight-blue sky, her alabaster skin shimmering with reflected starlight. Placed in the odalisque pose common to Orientalist painters' harem scenes, Hirsch's subject is a seductive fantasy, its eroticism made safe by its basis in Classical mythology. In Hesiod's Theogony, a poem that told of the birth of Greek gods and goddesses, Nyx was the personification of Night, a prime element of nature and one of the first beings to come from the Void.  The daughter of Chaos, Nyx and her siblings Erebus (Darkness), Gaia (the Earth), and Tartarus (the Underworld), were the parents of generations of Greek gods and goddesses. With her brother Erebus, Nyx gives birth to Aether (atmosphere), Hmera (day), while conceiving alone Momus (blame), Ponos (toil), Moros (fate), Thanatos (death) and Hynos (sleep) along with many others.  Such fecundity earned her the title of "lusty sire," described by Hesoid as an awe-inspiring, terrifying being living in an "awful home... wrapped in dark clouds" (see the Theogony's ff. 744-757).  It is this "home" that Hirsch paints so evocatively, a realm furnished only by the cloud-like divan and swirling swaths of dark fabric, the cool color palette interrupted by splashes of the hot pink and dusty oranges of exotic flowers, some of their petals shed, while a stem of closed buds is held by Night, ready to bloom with the coming of day.  Night proved a powerful source of inspiration for artists from antiquity through the nineteenth century; works by Hirsch's contemporaries William Bouguereau and Henri Fantin-Latour also mine her ancient iconography of ethereal mystery and alluring power.