The two sisters
| Support Type: | Canvas |
| Paint Type: | Oil Paint |
| Current Location: | Musée du Louvre, Paris, France |
| Location History: | The painting was made in 1843, at an important point in Chassériau’s artistic development. He had been trained under Ingres, whose emphasis on drawing, contour and classical structure strongly shaped his early work. At the same time, Chassériau was increasingly attracted to the colour and emotional intensity of Romantic painting, particularly the work of Delacroix. The Metropolitan Museum describes his mature style as a fusion of Ingres’s linear precision and Delacroix’s painterly Romanticism. |
The painting The Two Sisters (1843) by Theodore Chasseriau is an intriguing exploration of sisterhood that epitomized Chasseriau’s growth from painting Neoclassicism to Romanticism. To begin with, the artist made use of repetition, in dressing his sisters similarly and placing them almost symmetrical in the composition, so that they could face each other almost at same angle but hold each other’s hands. However, their facial expressions seem to suggest a sense of individual personalities that have been formed around the central relationship. The work manages to avoid melodramatic excesses characteristic of many other Romantic painters and, instead, produces a certain calmness and restraint through depiction of composed posture, a melancholic mood and a minimalistic background of dark green. Moreover, the painting reflects the context of its emergence, being a work, which highlighted the transition between styles. In fact, the meticulous yet tactful use of linearity and modelling speaks of the academic training under Ingres, while the employment of atmospheric lighting, rich colours and introspective approach foreshadows the coming of Romanticism. Overall, by capturing the bivalent nature of the sitter and setting, the painting, The Two Sisters (1843) by Theodore Chasseriau, emerges as a work that examines the co-existence of two women who share similar traits yet are different at their cores.