# Figure Composition

- By: Nielsen, Ville Jais (Danish, 1886–1949)
- Date: 1949
- Classification: Painting
- Dimensions: height 130 cm, width 100 cm
- Culture: Danish
- Museum: [SMK – National Gallery of Denmark](https://open.smk.dk/artwork/image/KMS9063)
- Rights: [Public Domain Mark: SMK waives its rights in this photograph](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/)
- Picture: https://iip-thumb.smk.dk/iiif/jp2/gf06g728r_kms9063.tif.jp2/full/!1920,1080/0/default.jpg
- Who can see it: Tweens profiles and older (museums give no ratings; placed by Invisible Network from the museum's own words)

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.