Closer to the actual portrait of “Woman with a Pearl”. Bert Goldschmidt, the young woman who lived next door, posed for the artist. Corot dressed her in an Italian dress, forced her to put on her vest and sat in a pose close to Leonardo’s “Gioconda”.
Soft light simulates a rounded face, trembles and flutters in small pieces that adorn the chestnut hair. The gray, slightly darkening downward background is tonally connected with a figure, solved in the same gray scale, beautifully and variously combined with blue, yellow, pink and brown in clothes. Transparent trembling shadows, the system of the thinnest valer, widely used by the artist in landscapes, are used here, enhancing the poetry, the musical mood of the image.
Before the viewer – and a specific image, and at the same time is no longer a real woman, but the artist’s muse, the embodiment of his dreams. “The whole picture radiates spiritual beauty,” writes L. Venturi, “reflecting the grace of the soul, beautiful and subtle precisely because it is natural and blooms like a flower or a branch of a tree.” It is difficult to find in French art of those years another example of such a harmonious, sublime and simultaneously abstract understanding of the portrait image.
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