Painted in 1892, Lady with a Pearl Ferronnière dates from the most decisive and transformative year of Juana Romani’s career. That year, her Salon entries were described by contemporary critics as the work of a “jeune et brillante artiste”¹, marking her full emergence as an independent painter of distinction within the Parisian art world. No longer perceived merely as a muse, Romani asserted herself as an artist of formidable technical skill and singular vision.
This achievement was rooted in Romani’s early formation. Born in 1867 in Velletri, in the Roman Campagna, Giovanna Carolina Carlesimo later adopted the name Juana Romani. She moved with her family to Paris as a child and, by the early 1880s, was working as an artist’s model. Among those for whom she posed were Alexandre Falguière, Victor Prouvé, Carolus-Duran, Jean-Jacques Henner and Ferdinand Roybet. Her formative relationships with Henner and Roybet proved particularly influential, shaping both her artistic training and the trajectory of her early career.
The present work depicts the same sitter as Bianca Capello, exhibited at the Salon in the same year, and should be understood in close dialogue with that painting, as well as with La Vénetienne. Together, these works form a coherent group that signals Romani’s artistic maturity. While still bearing traces of Henner’s influence, most notably in the earthy tonality, the velvety handling of flesh and the atmosphere of quiet enigma, Lady with a Pearl Ferronnière demonstrates a growing synthesis of references that are distinctly Romani’s own.
The composition is marked by a deliberate reduction of background and peripheral elements into softly modulated planes, suppressing anecdotal detail in favour of an intensified psychological presence. This compositional economy focuses the viewer’s attention on the sitter’s face: the steady, interrogative gaze; the subtle turn of the head; the loose wisp of hair falling across the cheek; and the small pearl ferronnière placed at the centre of the brow, acting as visual anchor and symbolic accent.
The contrast between the sitter’s pale, softly modelled skin and the saturated red of the dress is one of the painting’s most striking painterly effects. Romani treats flesh with extraordinary delicacy, while the garment is imbued with weight and depth, its rich colour asserting the physical and sensual presence of the figure. Though the fabric here is less elaborately described than in some of her later works, it already anticipates the artist’s celebrated ability to render luxurious textiles with painterly authority.
The ferronnière itself, along with the chromatic choice of the dress, clearly recalls Leonardo da Vinci’s La Belle Ferronnière, which Romani would have known intimately from the Louvre during her years in Paris. This reference is both homage and assertion. By invoking one of the most enigmatic female portraits of the Renaissance, Romani situates her work within a prestigious historical lineage while simultaneously reimagining that tradition through a modern, fin de siècle sensibility.
As with many of Romani’s female subjects, whether mythological, historical or unnamed, the woman depicted here embodies a broader feminine archetype. Shoulders bare, body enveloped in heavy drapery, she commands the pictorial space with a quiet but unmistakable authority. Her gaze confronts the viewer directly, questioning and challenging, a recurring motif in Romani’s oeuvre and a key element of her fascination with powerful, seductive women.
Lady with a Pearl Ferronnière reflects Romani’s artistic independence at the height of her early success. Closely related to her Salon painting Bianca Capello, it combines technical assurance with the psychological intensity that defines her most accomplished work. From the age of thirty-seven Romani suffered from severe mental illness, leading to her long-term institutionalisation and withdrawal from artistic life, a fate that contributed significantly to the subsequent eclipse of both her career and her artistic legacy.
Footnote
¹ Anonymous, ‘Paris-Noël’, L’Art français, no. 268, 23 December 1892, n.p.: ‘La jeune et brillante artiste expose elle-même deux figures remarquables.’
