Girl with Bare Shoulder, c. 1880

In his small oil painting Girl with Bare Shoulder, created around 1880, the Viennese artist Franz Rumpler (1848–1922) showed the back, right shoulder, neck and profile of a young woman with reticent eroticism. On first glance, everything about the work appears sketch-like: the white-gray background is patchy and undefined, and the girl’s falling garment is lacking plasticity and contour towards the bottom. In the center of the depiction, however, Rumpler rendered the brightened, delicate neck and ear, revealed by the pinned-up hair, with great painterly precision. Even though the strokes of the preparatory contour drawing are still visible on the right side of the neck and upper arm, the execution exceeds the character of a study. This impression is emphasized by the use of color, as the delicate red of the cheek and the brown hues of the girl’s hair correspond to the colors of the dress in the lower part of the depiction.

MK, 2021