Alice Pike Barney, born Cincinnati, OH - Titian Hair - n.d. - T-Shirt

A pastel profile of a woman with full red-gold hair, bowed head and bare shoulder, set against sweeping blue-grey strokes that make colour the real subject.

Visual Elements & Composition

The figure is turned to the left and looking down, her face partly in shadow. Her hair is the strongest note on the page: a full mass of red-gold and copper tones, piled up and softly curled at the crown. Against it, a blue-grey wrap falls from her shoulders, and a row of small fringed pendants in green, blue and rose hangs across her bare upper back. The background is a loose field of blue and grey strokes that curve around the figure, and warm paper shows through at the edges. The signature sits at the left, below the shoulder line.

Meaning & Symbolism

The title refers to "titian," the name given in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to warm, reddish hair, taken from the Venetian painter Titian, whose canvases of auburn-haired women were widely copied and celebrated. Alice Pike Barney, born in Cincinnati in 1857 and active in Paris and Washington, D.C., worked in portraiture and decorative figure studies. Here the bowed head and half-turned face carry a mood of reverie and quiet withdrawal, while the cool blue ground lets the hair glow.

Built Around the Colour

This is a design where the eye moves from the warm hair outward into cool strokes and back again, so it reads best when the shirt is seen up close and in full view. The loose, sweeping movement of the background wraps the figure the way the blue-grey wrap does, which gives the composition its sense of ease. Wearing it puts that contrast of copper and slate right in front of you.