Slender Woman with Vase

Jozseph Rippl-Rónaï · 1894

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

186 × 73 cm (73 1/4 × 28 3/4 in.); Framed: 198.8 × 86.7 × 7.4 cm (78 1/4 × 34 1/8 × 2 7/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Impressionism

Slender Woman with Vase is a quietly arresting work — its elongated figure and hushed, interior atmosphere giving it the feel of a held breath. József Rippl-Rónai painted it during his Paris years, a period in which he moved within the orbit of the Nabis, the post-Impressionist group that included Vuillard and Bonnard. He absorbed their devotion to flat, decorative form and muted, almost chalky colour harmonies, and brought to it something distinctly his own: a Hungarian sensibility for intimacy, and a restraint that keeps sentiment from tipping into sentimentality. The composition is less concerned with depicting a woman than with evoking a mood — the figure and the vase exist together as pattern and presence. Rippl-Rónai was sometimes called "the Hungarian Nabi" by his contemporaries in Paris, a recognition of how fully he had absorbed the movement's visual philosophy while remaining an outsider to it. The painting now lives in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Our hand-painted oil reproduction is made to the same dimensions as the original, following Rippl-Rónai's tonal palette and loose, confident brushwork, so the stillness and decorative grace of the painting come through as they do standing before the canvas itself.