Closed Eyes

1890

Oil on canvas mounted on cardboard, 44 × 36 cm. Musée d'Orsay, Paris

A head with lowered lids rises above a band of pale light. The Musée d'Orsay treats it as a defining image of Symbolist painting.

With the eyes shut, the subject becomes thought rather than appearance. The museum reads the closed lids as a sign of inward life, of dreaming and absence.
It repeats a motif from one of the artist's earlier drawings.
Look at the space around the bust: it is left undefined, so the figure seems to float.
The paint is thin enough for the canvas weave to show through.
Bought from his studio in 1904, it was the first of his works in the French national collections.

The model was most likely his wife, Camille Falte. The face recalls the Dying Slave by Michelangelo, now in the Louvre, whose shut eyes he wrote about in his journal.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · PD-Art