Born in Senlis in 1815, Thomas Couture was encouraged by his shoemaker father, Jean, to become a scholar or academician. Proving to be a disappointment to the family because his seeming lack of intellectual promise, Jean focused on teaching an older son the classics. Thomas grew up with a basic insecurity about his education, and he consistently wavered between a desire to show up authority with his independence, and a need to impress with his erudition.
About 1828 Couture matriculated in the École gratuite de dessin at the Conservatoire des arts et métiers on Rue Saint-Martin in Paris. He was inculcated with the ideal of combining art and technology, and later he executed designs for the applied arts and encouraged his students to follow his example.
Couture studied under Antoine Gros (1771-1835) from 1830-1835, and following Gros’s suicide, switched to the atelier of Paul Delaroche (1797-1856). He was officially registered at the École des Beaux-Arts in April 1831. Under Gros and Delaroche he experienced a conflict between loyalty to their ideals and the need to maintain his individuality. In 1839 he struck out on his own.

The dominant subject of Couture’s repertoire is the portrait. Although orders for his portraits accelerated in the boom years after his early success with Romans of the Decadence, which climaxed his early series of works based on themes of moral depravity and for which he was heavily lauded at the Salon of 1847, he worked in the portraiture genre throughout his career. He pioneered a certain type of portrait, which affected such prominent contemporaries as Gustave Richard, Gustave Courbet and his students Uno Troili and William Morris Hunt: Couture showed only the head and shoulders against a shadowy or blank backdrop, and most sitters look out from the corners of their eyes at the viewer, as seen in the present composition, Young Beauty. The hallmarks of his style are a splash of scumbled light, which forms a kind of aura in the otherwise dark background, and a flash of white in the collar. Couture painted mainly distinguished sitters, aristocrats and self-made men who came to power during the July Monarchy and Second Empire.

Couture’s most important contribution to the history of art was as an independent teacher, and his eclectic proclivities attracted an international student body. Among his immediate students were the French painters Manet, Puvis de Chavannes, Desboutin; the Germans Feuerbach, Hennenberg and Gentz; and the Americans Hunt, Johnson and Newman. Since many of his disciples became influential in their own right, one must consider his far-reaching impact on Impressionism, Post-Impressionism (Seurat and Cezanne were admirers), and Symbolism; and through his influence on the teacher of Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917) and on the ideas of the Ashcan School of the early twentieth century, he entered directly into the mainstream of contemporary art.

The present composition is a study for one of Couture’s masterworks, The Marriage of Harlequin, circa1866-1867 (Musée Chéret, Nice) – the culminating work in his series of paintings of the Commedia dell’Arte, illustrating in particular the Pierrot and Harlequin story, a satirical tale of social behavior. The marriage between Harlequin and Columbine was a recurrent finale in the plots of the Commedia dell’Arte and it achieved symbolic status in the 19th century. In Couture’s larger composition, he depicts a scene wherein Harlequin and Columbine prepare to sign the marriage contract in the notary’s quarters after several delays and interruptions caused by jealous rivals or by Columbine’s miserly father, Cassandre. Cassandre, however, is willing to part with his daughter for the large dowry that turns up at the last moment, and in Couture’s composition, it is Cassandre who is the central figure kneeling with the gold in the notary’s chambers in front of Harlequin and Columbine as they prepare to sign the contract. The present composition is a study for the central figure, Cassandre’s bowed head.


Exhibitions:
Paris Salons of 1838, 1840, 1841, 1843-1845, 1847, 1855, 1872

Awards and Honors:
Third-class Medal, Salon of 1844; First Class Medal, Salon of 1847; Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur, 1848; Gold Medal, Paris Exposition Universelle 1855