Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt
Georges Clairin (1843 to 1919) · 1876
Sarah Bernhardt, thirty two years old and already the most talked about actress in Paris, reclines on a divan in a long white satin dress that pours across the cushions and onto the floor. A greyhound stretches at her feet, palms and oriental fabrics fill the background, and she looks at us with an expression that is somewhere between boredom and command. The setting is the salon of the house she had just built near the Parc Monceau, decorated in the bohemian, exotic taste she made fashionable. Clairin painted her at the moment of her first triumphs at the Comédie-Française in Racine and Hugo.
The picture is a lesson in how to make a portrait into a performance. The pose is a long diagonal that runs from the head at the upper left down to the hem of the dress, and the whole composition curls around it like a signature. Look at the way the white satin is painted, with pinks and greys and touches of pale blue in the folds, and at the ostrich feather fan resting in her lap. The sinuous lines and iridescent tones already point toward Art Nouveau, which would adopt Bernhardt as its muse twenty years later through Mucha's posters.
Clairin, who had trained as an orientalist painter, met Bernhardt in the early 1870s and remained her friend, occasional lover and official portraitist for the rest of his life. When the portrait was shown at the Salon of 1876 the press was fascinated, and Bernhardt kept it in her own home until her death; her son Maurice gave it to the Petit Palais in 1923. The actress's famous slimness, which cartoonists mocked, is here turned into pure elegance. Notice the small dog: like the palms, it was part of the menagerie of a woman who also kept a lion cub.
Did You Know? Bernhardt kept this portrait in her own house for almost fifty years; it entered the museum only after her death in 1923, given by her son.
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