Segovian Girl 1912

Robert Henri's "Segovian Girl" is all warm browns and soft highlights, alive with a sense of captured movement. Looking at her, I imagine Henri, brush loaded, circling this girl, trying to capture the light on her face, the set of her shoulders, and the gravity of youth. Her dark hair and somber expression stand in high contrast to the bright gold embellishments on her dark jacket. Thick strokes of white suggest the presence of a fan near her waist, but nothing is sharply defined. There's a painting by Manet, a portrait of Émile Zola, and it has a similar tension between the specificity of a face and the suggestive quality of the rest of the image, like a record of a fleeting moment in the studio. Henri’s interest in the Ashcan School and capturing everyday life is certainly on display here. It reminds us that artists build on the ideas of those who came before, reinterpreting and extending painting’s possibilities.