#full length

Alida Christina Assink by Jan Adam Kruseman, 1833.

Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

Collection: The Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, South Carolina, United States

Collection: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, NY, United States

Born to prominent Spanish nobility, Eugénie was educated in France, Spain, and England. As Empress, she used her influence to champion "authoritarian and clerical policies"; her involvement in politics earned her much criticism from contemporaries. Napoléon and Eugénie had one child together, Louis-Napoléon, Prince Imperial (1856–1879). After the fall of the Empire, the three lived in exile in England; Eugénie outlived both her husband and son and spent the remainder of her life working to commemorate their memories and the memory of the Second French Empire.

Broad, slashing strokes give powerful shape to this defiant female figure standing with parted legs, a pose more athletic - even pugilistic - than seductive. Her oppositional posturing matched the painter’s contrary aesthetic sensibilities. The Realist painter Henri sought a provocative and timely subject in Salome, the biblical figure who served as her mother’s dutiful pawn in facilitating King Herod’s assassination of John the Baptist. By the late nineteenth century Salome had evolved into a far more aggressive and decadent creature, as witnessed in Oscar Wilde’s notorious play of 1891. That Henri adopted the theme in 1909 suggests his desire to capitalize on Salome’s high currency for controversy, which had been confirmed by the New York Metropolitan Opera’s scandal-provoking performance of Richard Strauss’s Salome (based on Wilde’s play) in 1907. The gleam of amusement that enhances Salome’s haughty expression slyly evokes her complicity in constructing Henri’s own reputation as a radical painter.