Woman with Violets

Woman with Violets reflects the spirit of the time. The subject of a woman, dressed in black with a veil covering her head, is a possible allusion to mourning. Her pose addresses some of the main concerns of symbolist painting: solitude, the quest for the eternal, the transience of life, and the imminence of death. Her attire is completely European, a fact that reflects the influence of the Continent on middle-and upper-middle-class Mexican life at the turn of the century. At that time, the influence of European culture had not yet been replaced by the Mexican imagery that would fill the art of the Revolution. An open landscape with a forest as a setting for the figure of the woman and works as a compositional frame for the painting’s structure. The mastery in the depiction of light, the use of blurred edges, and the way the pigment is applied to create tiny brushstrokes of complementary colors certainly show evidence of the artist’s knowledge of Impressionism and avant-garde European painting. Pliego Quijano, Susana. Mexican modern painting from the Andrés Blaisten Collection, Mexico: RM Verlag, 2011, page 34..