GALLANT SCENE IN THE LIBRARY Painting EROTICA

This small oval painting, set in a plain black frame, depicts an interior scene with a gallant atmosphere, characteristic of 19th-century bourgeois taste. In a library filled with bound volumes, a woman in a corseted dress and white cap holds a candle whose flame brightly illuminates her face and shoulders. Surprised or hesitant, she tries to resist the insistent gestures of a man seated beside her, who pulls her toward him and insistently uncovers her bodice. The scene, intimate and ambiguous, is rendered with extreme precision: the table in the foreground, cluttered with papers and a pair of opera glasses, indicates a learned and orderly world, suddenly disrupted by the irruption of desire.

This type of work belongs to the tradition of romantic and gallant genre scenes of the 19th century, particularly appreciated in bourgeois circles. While grand history painting and landscapes dominated the official salons, another market developed: that of small cabinet paintings, precise and narrative, often executed on ivory, porcelain, or copper. They circulated in private interiors, collected for their anecdotal charm, sometimes slightly risqué, without crossing the bounds of propriety. In a society where relations between the sexes were strictly codified, these scenes made it possible to express, in a veiled form, the eternal game of seduction and female resistance.

The candlelight, fragile and flickering, here becomes a symbol of morality and vigilance, opposed to the complicit shadow where passion is expressed. The whole conveys well the tension between the 19th-century bourgeois ideal of respectability and the discreet attraction to more sensual images, destined not for public salons but for private eyes. The signature, visible in the lower part, read as Ferres or similar, designates a painter yet to be identified, probably belonging to that circle of artists specialized in the small gallant scenes prized during the century.

PERIOD : 19th century
TOTAL DIMENSION WITH FRAME 16 cm x 14 cm
SIZE WITH FRAME : 6.3" x 5.5"