Mademoiselle Antoinette May

Mademoiselle Antoinette May, executed in watercolour in 1890, belongs to the period when Zorn was building his reputation as a watercolourist of exceptional facility among the European and American bourgeoisie. The name Antoinette May suggests a French or Anglophone sitter, consistent with the international social milieu Zorn inhabited during his Paris years of the late 1880s and early 1890s. Watercolour portraiture occupied a distinct market niche in this period: faster and more intimate than oil, less expensive, and possessing a quality of spontaneity that oil rarely achieved, it was particularly valued for informal likenesses of women and children. Zorn's watercolours brought him commissions across Europe and eventually America, where his technique was admired alongside that of John Singer Sargent as the apotheosis of bravura watercolour portraiture. This work would have been produced in a single sustained session of concentrated observation, Zorn's characteristic method for watercolour that left little room for revision.

Watercolour on paper with Zorn's characteristically wet, direct technique: large initial washes establishing the overall tone, followed by rapid descriptive strokes while wet that model the face and costume simultaneously. Minimal dry-brush work in the finishing stages preserves the medium's luminosity.