Study for "Le Poème de l’âme" (The Poem of the Soul)
Anne-François-Louis Janmot French
Not on view
The Lyonnais painter Janmot spent the majority of his career working on his "Poème de l’âme" (Poem of the Soul), which is comprised of eighteen paintings and sixteen large-scale drawings accompanied by an epic poem (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon). This drawing, annotated with the title of the series, appears to be a study for a figure in one of the later finished drawings, "Rêve de feu" (Dream of fire). In this delicate sketch, the young woman's closed eyes and the soft light that cascades across her face contribute to a dream-like quality. Janmot, whose work is difficult to classify stylistically for his time, is often described as "proto-Symbolist."
