Woman in Hat with Roses

This was one of the first pictures Corinth painted after suffering a stroke during a holiday on the Italian Riviera. It is fascinating for the immediacy of the angled, low view point the artist has chosen despite the way that this distorts the features. The rose-decorated hat takes up the movement of the head and the eyes and sends it out elliptically beyond the picture edges. The expressive brush work that seems to skim over the physicality of the décolleté is at its most powerful around the woman’s eyes. With its inherent light, the color in this work creates a feeling of vitality that banishes any threat of darkness.