Today I headed down to the Philadelphia Museum of Art on the Ben Franklin Parkway in Center City. As I gazed at the beautiful masterpieces on the walls, and glorious sculptures throughout the museum, one monument came directly to my attention. The monument card read La Premiere Pose, Howard Roberts, (American 1843-1900), 1873-1876, Marble. It faces a northern wall and is placed on top of a large wooden stand. The sculpture itself is completely white marble and is exactly fifty-one and a quarter inches in size. It is lit in a manner that makes it seem as if it is being kissed by the sun. .
Howard Roberts is an American artist born in 1843 in Philadelphia. He, much like his contemporaries who included fellow Philadelphia native Thomas Eakins, traveled to France to study. He mastered the French style of portraying the human figure and the theory of Realism. In 1876 Roberts displayed La Premiere Pose at the Centennial Exhibition. It was immediately critically acclaimed for its subtle French style and wonderfully rendered realism. However, the use of a young woman posing nude with a shy and nervous look seemed to be almost too much of a French piece. Critics claimed that it was an excuse to portray the female nude with the immediacies of sensuous realism. Its defenders argued that it was a moral and compassionate delineation of the model's quandary. Whatever the case may be La Premiere Pose brought a new sophisticated, and highly developed approach to American sculpture in the Nineteenth Century.
The sculpture itself is a beautiful pose of a nude female with her right hand placed delicately under her chin, and her left arm covering a portion of her face and resting bent over her head. She is sitting on a highly decorated chair, a piece that seems as if it were of the Rococo, and a flowing cloth with meticulous attention to detail on the numerous tassels adorning the bottom. Her legs are also crossed in way that suggests a simple nervousness.
