La Tristesse

This bronze bust depicts a young woman with a sorrowful expression, her head tilted downward, her shoulders slouched in anguish. Rather than presenting an individual portrait, the artist personified the emotion of sadness with a generic figure. Influenced by the fluid contours of Art Nouveau, the artist followed the late nineteenth-century tendency of stepping away from a Classical approach to art to make space for complex explorations of human psychology and agency.