L’INCONNUE DE LA EINE FRENCH ANTIQUE PORTRAIT OIL PAINTING OLD DEATH MASK WOMAN

RARE AND EMOTIONALLY FASCINATING ANTIQUE FRENCH IMPRESSIONIST OIL PAINTING ON CANVAS DEPICTING THE MYSTERIOUS MASK PORTRAIT LINCONNE DE LA EINE, THE UNKNOWN WOMAN OF SEINE. (b. 1865-1885) SHE WAS AN UNIDENTIFIED YOUNG WOMAN WHOSE PUTATIVE DEATH MASK BECAME A POPULAR FIXTURE ON THE WALLS OF ARTISTS' HOMES AFTER 1900. HER VISAGE INSPIRED NUMEROUS LITERARY WORKS. THIS WORK IS SIGNED AND DATED 1942. THE SIGNATURE IS ILLEGIBLE TO ME. PERHAPS YOU RECOGNIZE THE ARTIST? THE CONDITION IS GOOD WITH MILD PAINT LOSS AS SHOWN. DIMENSIONS: 9”W x 11”H According to an oft-repeated story, the body of the young woman was pulled out of the River Seine at the Quai du Louvre in Paris around the late 1880s.Since the body showed no signs of violence, suicide was suspected.A pathologist at the Paris Morgue was, according to the story, so taken by her beauty that he felt compelled to make a wax plaster cast death mask of her face. It has been questioned whether the expression of the face could belong to a drowned person. According to the draughtsman Georges Villa, who received this information from his master, the painter Jules Joseph Lefebvre, the impression was taken from the face of a young model who died of tuberculosis around 1875, but no trace of the original cast remained. According to other accounts, the mask was taken from the daughter of a mask manufacturer in Germany. The identity of the girl was never discovered. Claire Forestier estimated the age of the model at no more than 16, given the firmness of the skin. In the following years, numerous copies were produced. The copies quickly became a fashionable, albeit morbid, fixture in Parisian Bohemian society. Albert Camus and others[who?]compared her enigmatic smile to that of the Mona Lisa, evoking much speculation as to what clues the seemingly happy expression, perceived as eerily serene, on her face could offer about her life, her death, and her place in society. The popularity of the figure is also of interest to the history of artistic media, relating to its widespread reproduction. The original cast had been photographed, and new casts were created from the film negatives. These new casts displayed details that are usually lost in bodies taken from the water, but the apparent preservation of these details in the visage of the cast seemed to only reinforce its authenticity. In the decades that followed, the mask was mass-produced and sold as a decorative item for the walls of private homes and studios, first in Paris, then abroad. L’Inconnue became a muse for artists, poets and other writers, among them Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Rainer Maria Rilke and Vladimir Nabokov. L’Inconnue hung in the studio of Albert Camus, who called her a “drowned Mona Lisa.” She inspired some of the films of François Truffaut. Critic Al Alvarez wrote in his book on suicide, The Savage God: "I am told that a whole generation of German girls modeled their looks on her." According to Hans Hesse of the University of Sussex, Alvarez reports, "the Inconnue became the erotic ideal of the period, as Bardot was for the 1950s. He thinks that German actresses such as Elisabeth Bergner modeled themselves on her. She was finally displaced as a paradigm by Greta Garbo. As of 2017 a workshop called L'Atelier Lorenzi in Arcueil made plaster death masks from a 19th-century mold, which is said to be that of L'Inconnue de la Seine DISCOVERED 1880s UNIDENTIFIED FOR 132 to 142 years SEX Female LOCATION Paris, France AGE ≥16 RACE White BODY CONDITION Recognizable face POSTMORTEM INTERVAL Recent CAUSE OF DEATH Drowning