Eugène Delacroix: Woman Caressing a Parrot
There appears to be something of a tradition of nude or scantily clad women painted with parrots. It began in the Baroque (example: Rosalba Carrera) but really flowered in the 19th century with Delacroix and many later examples.
These
are innocent parrots but later representations of the bird are fraught
with erotic meaning. During the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, the parrot – having once symbolised Eve – became instead an
image of sexual lust and longing. Wistful women alone in their boudoirs
contemplate their pet parrots as they dream of their distant lovers. The
most famous examples of the genre, by Manet, by Courbet, by Renoir, are
too precious to have been sought as loans by the Barber Institute. But
the exhibition does include two wonderful lesser known examples: A Woman in a Red Jacket Feeding a Parrot, by the seventeenth-century painter from Leiden, Frans van Mieris the Elder; and Giambattista Tiepolo’s smouldering Young Woman with a Macaw, a capriccio executed by the greatest Venetian painter of the eighteenth century for Empress Elisabeth Petrovna of Russia.
A blushing young lady, in decolletage so low-cut as to reveal her right
breast, stares into space. The parrot she caresses looks out at the
spectator with a sharp, proprietorial gaze. [Andrew Graham-Dixon]
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