Figure Composition
Nielsen, Ville Jais (Danish, 1886–1949)
1949
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- height 130 cm, width 100 cm
- Culture
- Danish
- Museum
- SMK – National Gallery of Denmark
- Rights
- Public Domain Mark: SMK waives its rights in this photograph, as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the SMK – National Gallery of Denmark
About this work
A female figure, dressed in pink, placed in a tightly organised plane of uniform colour fields, framed and intersected by striking black lines: these are the main elements of this monumental composition. The picture was painted in 1949, during a stay in the small town of Vence near Nice in southern France. Both in terms of its subject (a woman on a balcony) and execution (a stringent composition with an emphasis on decorative lines and a simple, warm palette). The picture acknowledges the French tradition in painting that influenced Ville Jais-Nielsen’s own artistic point of departure, not least the inspiration of Henri Matisse, who lived and worked in Vence from 1943–48. The painting demonstrates the changes in Ville Jais-Nielsen’s figure painting from the time she first grappled with the genre as a young artist in the 1910s. A great simplicity of composition and almost sketch-like, unfinished features characterise the paintings from her final decade. This picture would be one of Ville Jais-Nielsen’s very last. She died a few months later, in November 1949.
