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Self Portrait In A Straw Hat Essay

Decent Essays

The two paintings which will be compared and contrasted are entitled ‘Woman with a hat’ by Henri Matisse and ‘Self-portrait in a Straw Hat’ by Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun. Both of these artists have used the portraiture as a subject and have chosen painting as their art form and oils on canvas as their medium. However, each of these artist’s interpretation of their artwork is very different. Matisse has concentrated on colours as he has applied a mixture of brilliant colour all across his subjects face, hat, dress and even the background, whereas Vigee Le Brun has focused on showing extreme reality in order to demonstrate her painting skills which will be explored further.

Each artist has used a different style in their painting. Vigee Le Brun …show more content…

Both portraits are paintings that include a woman and a hat. Though Matisses’ art is a portrait of his wife while Le Brun is painting portrait of herself. In each of these portraits the artists have approached it differently and have different intentions and meanings. Matisses’ use of bright colours communicate his painting subjectively and the loose brush strokes made the painting look almost unfinished which was essentially the artist’s move towards an expressive individual style. Matisse is communicating subjectively as he has used colours not to imitate nature but to produce a reaction in the viewer. The hat is being used to show that she is an upper class woman. In Matisse’s portrait Amelia is holding a fan which is seemingly important as it’s used to show mood, while in Le Brun’s self-portrait she is holding a paint palette. The hat is important to the painting as in fact it is the main purpose of his painting. As the painting is entitled, ’Woman with a Hat’. Le Brun’s self-portrait represents how she’s painting it in the first place straight up. Hence, she is trying to communicate and put things in the painting to give clues about what she’s about and what she does for a living subjectively. It is also a means of representing her physical attributes, self-portraiture, her place in society and her style. And therefore she is subjectively communicating herself. As she was

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