Girl in Blue

Girl in Blue, dated to 1897, uses colour as its primary organisational principle, something relatively unusual in Godward's typically more complex colour schemes involving marble neutrals, warm flesh, and varied fabric tones. A dominant blue creates a unified colour field that focuses the figure against a strongly chromatic backdrop or envelops her in a single fabric of that colour. Blue had strong associations in Victorian aesthetic culture — the blue of clear Mediterranean sky, of antique faience, of the Aesthetic Movement's favourite japoniste blue-and-white pottery — and Godward's use of it situates the work within that aesthetic discourse. The relatively direct title suggests a work produced more for private sale than Royal Academy submission, where more elevated or literary titles were preferred. 1897 was a productive year in which Godward was working across several subject registers simultaneously.

A dominant blue required Godward to manage the interaction of that colour with his typically warm flesh palette, which could appear muddy or discordant against a strong blue field. He resolves this by warming the blues slightly toward teal or slate in the areas closest to the flesh, and by keeping the skin tones cooler than usual to bridge the two colour temperatures. The blue fabric itself is built from multiple transparent and semi-transparent layers of cobalt and ultramarine.