The Reluctant Bride

Common card · No. 352630

The Reluctant Bride (French: La Fiancée Hésitante, sometimes translated as 'The Hesitant Fiancée' or 'The Hesitant Betrothed') is an 1866 oil painting by Auguste Toulmouche. The painting measures 65 cm × 54 cm (26 in × 21 in) and is signed and dated "A. Toulmouche / 1866". The painting is currently owned by a private collector. Toulmouche had found success as a genre painter in an Academic style by 1866, winning medals at the Paris Salon for paintings depicting fashionable women in luxurious interiors, described by Émile Zola as "Toulmouche's delicious dolls" (délicieuses poupées de Toulmouche). Departing from Toulmouche's usual paintings of a single woman, this work is a more complicated composition showing a group of women in an opulently decorated room. The figures congregate in the lower half of the canvas, with the upper half devoted to the flamboyantly decorated room and its gilded furniture. The scene is set shortly before the wedding of the central young woman, waiting in a parlour...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Auguste Toulmouche, Public domain