Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (MNBA) in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Location History:
The painting was purchased directly from the 1908 French Exhibition in Buenos Aires for 2,500 francs through the dealer Boussod, Valadon & Cie. and has remained in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes ever since.
Adolphe Monticelli's La Révérence (The Curtsey) demands that we reconsider the very nature of painterly finish. Executed in oil on panel, this small work, 36.5 by 54.5 centimetres, is not a window onto a plausible world but a defiant assertion of paint's primacy over picture. The surface is thick, encrusted, almost sculptural. Figures emerge from and dissolve back into a haze of colour. To call it a fête galante is accurate but insufficient; Monticelli has taken a genre of polite entertainment and transmuted it into a private, feverish dreamscape.
Born in Marseille in 1824, Adolphe Monticelli was a French painter of the generation preceding the Impressionists, a solitary visionary whose bombastic confidence proved contagious. After training in Marseille and Paris, he developed a style of thick impasto and scintillating glazes that placed him in a peculiar and luminous isolation. While his contemporaries chased a fleeting, atmospheric realism, Monticelli chased a brilliant, enduring fantasy.
The painting's force is not its subject but its substance. Rejecting the polished finish of academic art, Monticelli builds his scene entirely from memory, inventing a world of decadent fête galante, a genre of amorous, elegant outdoor entertainment perfected by Antoine Watteau. In this particular work, the scene is a fragment of a dream: two elegant 18th-century figures in a dappled forest clearing, the woman sweeping into a deep, graceful curtsey. Yet her partner seems barely there, a suggestion of a silhouette in lemon and gold. The title refers to this gesture of formal greeting, a "reverence" paid not to a king in a palace, but within a secluded, almost private outdoor space that exists only in the artist's imagination.
Monticelli constructs his fantasy from thick impasto, daubs of oil paint applied with a short, hard brush, creating a dazzling, mosaic-like surface. Diamonds of emerald, cyan, violet, and pink dance against a dark, resonant background. He sculpts the gossamer folds of a woman's dress in what appears to be pure, unblended color, then sketches his features with a few rapid, decisive strokes. To lean in is to see an abstraction; to step back is to see a glittering, living fantasy. This "gem-like lustre" was achieved through techniques, attention to brushstroke, paint texture, and what Gauguin called "the accidents of colour", that van Gogh most admired. The result is an object of profound hedonism, a painting that refuses to be serious and, in doing so, achieves a kind of ecstatic truth.
Monticelli's achievement in La Révérence is to have painted memory itself, not the sharp, linear memory of fact, but the shimmering, untrustworthy memory of feeling. For him, the world was merely paint waiting to happen, and the real painting was the one he saw with his eyes closed. Today, the artwork is part of the permanent collection of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (MNBA) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where it has resided since its acquisition in 1908 at the French Exhibition in the Argentine Pavilion. It is a testament to Monticelli's lasting appeal far beyond his native France, a small, radiant dream that continues to beguile viewers a century and a half after it was painted.
I feel the painting resist me. It refuses to settle into a clear image instead, I experience it as matter, as paint asserting itself. The figures flicker in and out never fully arriving as if I am remembering rather than seeing. The woman’s curtsey feels intimate, almost secret, unfolding in a world built from sensation instead of fact. Up close, it dissolves into color and texture from afar it shimmers into life. I realize I am not witnessing a scene but entering a feeling unstable, lush and deeply personal, like a dream I cannot fully trust.
