Francisco Inglada - Sarah Bernhardt As Camille In The Lady Of The Camellias In 1882

Francisco INGLADABarcelona, 1850 - 1903Oil on canvas56 x 43 cm (74 x 62 cm with frame)Signed top left "Inglada"Beautiful carved wooden frameFrancisco Inglada painted here the great Sarah Bernhardt in her famous role of Camille Gautier in "La Dame aux Camélias" which she performed in Madrid at the Teatro Real during her 1882 tour of Spain. The beautiful and young Sarah Bernhardt has hair falling over her face, the profile with her recognizable mouth and nose. In the role of the beautiful courtesan, Sarah Bernhardt wears a neglected outfit with camellias in her hair.The young Inglada would then leave for Paris like so many other Catalan artists in the 1880s attracted by the Capital of the Arts. Francisco Inglada was one of the painters who came to work in Paris in the 1880s, like Francisco Parera (in the 1880s) and Eliséo Meifren (in 1879). In 1886, the influential critic of Le Figaro, Albert Wolff, called Paris the “capital of the arts,” adding: “It is in art that Paris, after its disasters, has found the renewal of its European situation.” [...] The siege of Paris had barely ended when foreign merchants rushed to the capital" because "nowhere could one bring together such a large collection of men who had marked the luminous phases of art." Inglada painted portraits and genre scenes, for example "A Lesson" (presented at the Barcelona Fine Arts Exhibition of 1880), "A Study from Nature" (1871, awarded an honorable mention), "A Gypsy and a Gypsy Woman" (Girona Exhibition in 1878), or "A Lady Walking in the Countryside", "A Lady Seated in a Garden" as well as Andalusian scenes in costume.