Girl in a Straw Bonnet

The prolific Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse found great success in France and in England, where he lived from 1850 to 1855. He marketed his work astutely, organizing special auctions, producing editions in bronze and terracotta, and designing decorative sculptural pieces that circulated widely in copies. Reacting against the static imagery that clung to portraiture, which was still under the sway of late Neoclassicism, he breathed new life into the genre in the 1850s by following the example of such realistic sculptors as Pierre-Jean David d’Angers. As June Ellen Hargrove has observed, his portraits of women are few, and for them he often worked in a neo-Rococo mode, participating in the eighte...