Ondine Jules Lefebvre

Jules Joseph Lefebvre was a renowned representative of the grand tradition of French painting: in 1861 he was awarded the Prix de Rome, and as a member of the jury of the Salon and a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian, he played a leading role in the Parisian art scene.
Lefebvre earned his fame mostly as a painter of nudes depicting allegorical, literary or mythological figures. In his delicately painted works, he masterfully combined the perfection of the classical female ideal with the observation of the model, virginal purity with sensuality. The life-size Undine, executed in 1881, focuses on a single red-haired figure shown frontally, her elegant contrapposto emphasising the flexibility of the body. Her immaculate whiteness recalls the smoothness of classical marble sculptures, while also paying homage to The Spring by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. The success of the work at the 1881 Salon is partly due to the fact that his portrayal of the female body was justified by a lofty theme from Germanic mythology, the story of a water nymph who gains a soul by marrying a man. Undine also caused a sensation at the summer exhibition of the Hungarian National Society of Fine Arts in 1885, where it was acquired by the Hungarian state.

Anna Zsófia Kovács