Autumn

Emile Eisman Semenowsky 1859 - 1911

Summary

In this highly romanticised allegory of autumn, a young woman stands in the dappled shade of a woodland glade. She carries a flat basket full of apples in both hands; more fruit is piled into a brass container at her feet, with a relief of fruit running round it. The hem of her elegant, pink- and ivory-striped dress, tied with a deep pink ribbon below the bust and topped with a bolero of the same shade, blows upwards in the breeze to reveal a pair of slender ankles in deep pink stockings. Long, fashionable gloves protect her arms. Her hair is the colour of bracken, her cheeks rosy and her full lips russet. Behind the wooded hillside, a cold, grey-blue mist alludes to the approach of winter. Eisman-Semenowsky was born in Poland, probably to Jewish parents. His main output consists of paintings of young bourgeois women wearing fashionable contemporary or orientalist dress. They seem to owe a debt to the work of the Belgian painter of portraits, history and genre scenes, Jan van Beers (1852-1927), for whom Eisman-Semenowsky possibly worked as a studio assistant.