About this work
- *La Cigale* is a 1900 pastel on canvas mounted on fiberboard, measuring 27 x 18⅛ inches.
- It is held at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, gifted by Laura Dreyfus Barney and Natalie Clifford Barney in memory of their mother.
- The Smithsonian archives record a photograph of "Natalie Barney, 1898, as La Cigale," indicating the subject of the painting is Natalie Barney in costume as the cigale (cicada). - The memorial lending catalogue lists *La Cigale* as a 27 x 18½ pastel among works including *Pierrette*, *Bacchante Triste*, and other costume figure pieces. - *La cigale* references La Fontaine's famous fable *La Cigale et la Fourmi*, in which the cicada passes the glorious days of summer consumed in song, while the industrious ant forages and stores food for the winter to come.
- When Whistler opened the Académie Carmen in 1898, Barney was one of the first students; Whistler was a formative influence, and in 1899 she began a salon on the Avenue Victor Hugo, where her art began to show a Symbolist influence.
- When Natalie wrote a chapbook of French poetry, *Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes*, Barney was pleased to provide illustrations.
**La Cigale** — *Alice Pike Barney, 1900*
A single costumed figure holds the composition — Natalie Clifford Barney, the artist's daughter, rendered in the character of *la cigale*, the singing cicada of La Fontaine's fable. Executed in pastel on canvas, the work measures 27 by 18⅛ inches — a format intimate enough to feel like a confidence, yet commanding enough to stop a room. Barney's handling of pastel is at its most assured here: the figure is conjured through layered, luminous strokes rather than hard contour, the costume dissolving into the background in a way that recalls Whistler's tonal dissolves while retaining the decorative warmth of French Symbolism. The palette likely draws on the warm golds and dusty ambers the cicada motif invited — summer heat made visible — with the characteristic softness Barney achieved in her finest figurative work.
*La Cigale* dates to 1900 and is now held in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It was made during the most concentrated and consequential period of Barney's career in Paris.
