After the ball
1895. Oil on canvas.On display elsewhere
Additional titles include Portrait of an adolescent; Lady in an interior with flowers; and Returning from the ball.
It was given an award in the National Fine Arts Exhibition of 1895.
Juan Antonio Benlliure developed his career specialising in portraiture and genre painting; having settled in Madrid, he achieved great prestige with society portraits of the day. Critics applauded his treatment of the female figure in his portraits, which reflect a distancing from the traditional, outmoded realism of previous decades and demonstrate a desire to get closer to newer languages that at times approximate Modernism. In this work, the artist plays with the ambiguity of showing us a composition that can be understood either as a portrait or as a genre scene. The protagonist is a female figure illustrating an action and a narrative, as her chosen pose serves as an introduction into her intimate world, the situation of which is described though an interior space that transports the viewer into the private sphere. The strength of the work is not to be found in the melodramatic episode of the female world, but instead in its pictorial treatment, in which the shapes are built from large chromatic blotches that capture the variations in colour and are contrasted with the play of black hues on the dress. The canvas could be classified as a form of timid modernism, like the work of Manuel Benedito, in which the approach to the style of the pompier becomes all too frequent when he works with the female figure. Juan Antonio Benlliure – less committed to this tendency – preferred to remain within the limits of gentle, elegant painting of bourgeois taste, modifying traditional realism with a certain ‘literaturisation’ in his stories, thus justifying the wide acceptance of his painting in the decades right before and after the turn of the century.
