- Hello everybody.
My name is Cecilia.
I'm an art history student at Harvard,
as well as one of the Ho Family Student Tour Guides
at the Harvard Art Museums.
Today, I am very excited to have been invited by The Met
to produce an art-inspired makeup tutorial
based on one of the works
in the European Paintings Department.
The look you see on my face is based on
Jean Marc Nattier's "Portrait of a Woman"
which dates to 1753.
(classical music)
- [Cecilia Voiceover] Nattier was a prolific
and highly successful portrait painter
during the reign of Louis XV,
and this half-length portrait is a late work of his.
The painting depicts a young woman
in three-quarter view gazing steadily at the viewer
before a basket of meticulously rendered flowers.
The precise identity of the sitter here is uncertain,
but she has traditionally been identified
as the marquise de Cypierre.
Her softly glowing features
and the warm landscape
against which she is set
are representative of Nattier's oeuvre.
This painting is part of the Linsky Collection at The Met
and hangs in Gallery 539 at The Met Fifth Avenue.
- My goal with this makeup tutorial
is to offer, in effect,
a close looking session an opportunity to linger
on this work a little bit longer
than one might otherwise be inclined,
and thereby come to a more intimate understanding
of what the work depicts and how.
Throughout this video,
I will seek to describe in detail
what exactly I see in the painting
and how I will then attempt to reproduce that
on my own face.
A kind of painterly reverse engineering.
I'll also provide art historical information
about the work, the artist, and the period.
So without any further ado let's get started.
Now, you may already have suspected that part
of the reason I selected this work
for a makeup tutorial was precisely the fact that
the sitter is so conspicuously wearing cosmetics.
Indeed the makeup she wears - the pale complexion
and the vividly rouge cheeks - is characteristic
of the cosmetic enhancements preferred
by the polite society of eighteenth century Europe.
In France, this flamboyant red-on-white appearance itself
became a powerful signifier of nobility, so much so
that according to some accounts, this kind of makeup
also eventually became a means of intentionally
confusing class distinctions.
This particular sitter's face is not only a site
of high contrast between white and red,
but also between light and dark.
She appears to be illuminated by a strong light source
slightly elevated and positioned toward the viewer's left.
And these lighting conditions have the effect
of dramatizing the topography of her face.
The high areas of her face,
like the center of her forehead and the tip of her nose,
are a very bright white,
whereas the lower areas are cast into dark shadow
like on her left cheek and the side of her nose.
And so with all that said, I'm going to begin
by applying a thin layer of white face paint,
not so much that it becomes a pure opaque white,
but just enough to lighten my complexion by a few shades.
Then I'll set it with a powder
so that it can remain intact going forward.
This will hopefully give me a nice clean base
to mimic some of the effects of the lighting later on.
(classical music resumes)
- [Cecilia Voiceover] Nattier's depictions of
aristocratic women tend to be highly conventionalized,
but this sitter's exceptionally bright cheeks,
unflinching gaze, and tightly coiled hair
suggest that the artist paid close attention
to the idiosyncrasies of her particular appearance.
Elements of this portrait seem to evoke
poetic similes about the sitter's beauty.
The skin of her left shoulder and chest
appears almost to dissolve into her gown,
perhaps inviting a comparison
between the fine fabric and her flawless ivory complexion.
Her elegantly poised right hand is tipped
with the same white touches as a flower she holds,
her fingers as bright, as dewy,
and as delicate as the petals.
- Great. So I think this gives us
a pretty good baseline of fairness.
As you saw, I took the face paint through my eyebrows
in order to lighten them, as my own brows are darker
than the sitter's taupish blonde ones.
And I'm actually going to move on to the eyes
before I address the rest of the complexion,
those shadows, and those arresting rouged cheeks.
The sitter's eyes, of course,
are a very different shape from my own, not least
because the sitter has eyelid creases and I do not.
And so in order to simulate those,
I'm actually going to use lash glue to kind of
give myself a temporary eyelid crease or fold.
But beyond that, the inner corners of her eyes
are a delicate pink echoing the flesh on her cheeks.
And if you look closely enough,
you can see that Nattier has actually placed
a stripe of white paint
along her bottom waterlines.
And interestingly enough,
this is actually a modern makeup technique.
Applying white along your bottom waterline
helps to make your eyes look bigger,
brighter, and more awake.
And I think the pigment in the portrait
achieves a similar effect.
So, in addition to my lash glue eyelid creases,
I'm also going to apply some pink
to the inner corners of my eyes,
then line my bottom waterlines
with a bright eyeliner pencil.
I'll also manipulate the shape of my brows
with a blonde eyebrow pencil
to make them look rounder and lower,
as it looks like the sitter's brows are lower,
relative to her eyes, than mine are.
(classical music resumes)
- [Cecilia Voiceover] The flowers are
an unusual addition for Nattier
and they stand to offer a fascinating perspective
on the sitter's use of cosmetics.
Though they might be read as a nod to what is "natural"
and a foil to the sitter's openly rouged face,
they might also be understood to exist somewhere
between nature and artifice.
The choicest blooms plucked from their original contexts
and arranged alongside other perfect specimens,
the flowers might be said to have undergone
as much idealizing, artful intervention
as the painted lady who holds them.
- Great, and I think we more or less have the eyes down.
I didn't mention this before
but I also traced over my quasi-creases
with a brownish pink pencil to emulate some
of the tones in the painting.
And I also did some detail work with a dark brown shadow
and I applied a little flick of eyeliner here
on the outer corner of my left eye.
The sitter has a little flick there as well
that I think is actually created by her lashes
but I wasn't able to get my lashes to appear so prominent
on camera, so I recreated it with some eyeliner.
And now we'll move on to emulating those striking shadows
throughout her face that are
most notably on her left cheek and temple,
just underneath her brow bone, down her nose,
and on her little chin dimple.
One thing to note too, is that again
the sitter and I have very different face shapes
and bone structures.
Under other circumstances,
I might've been able to try to make the shape of my face
more closely resemble the sitter's
with the help of contouring.
That is, with the help of selectively applied shadows.
Darkness and shadows, both in painting and in makeup,
create the illusion of recession.
So I might've been able to apply, say, a darker color
on the outside of my jaw
to make it look narrower, like the sitter's.
However, because the shadows on the sitter's face
in this particular portrait are so striking and so unique,
there's a little bit less that I can do
that would go unnoticed.
So I'm just going to try my best to recreate those shadows
that are so visible on the sitter's face.
I'm going to take this taupish-gray powder
and just apply it to all the areas I mentioned before,
wherever we see those dark shadows.
(classical music resumes)
- [Cecilia Voiceover] Discourse about painting's artifice
dates to antiquity
and it became increasingly fraught in the
artistic and social climate of eighteenth century France.
Makeup, painting, and portraiture specifically
lay in a complex nexus
of debates about representation, misrepresentation,
and self-representation that unfolded along lines
both aesthetic and moral.
These debates were related in turn to anxieties
about the growing influence of women in the arts,
as well as about social class in pre-revolutionary France.
- And after what feels like an eternity,
I think the contouring is just about done.
And, as you can see,
I also applied some of the white touches
along my nose, on the bridge and the tip.
And now with all of that done, we get to move
on to perhaps the most prominent cosmetic cameo
in this entire portrait, the rouged cheeks.
Although this liberal use of rouge
was very popular at the court of Louis XV,
this sitter's high color is nevertheless rather unique.
Her cheeks are not merely pink, but almost outright red.
And if you look closely enough,
you'll notice that this color
doesn't stay put on her cheeks,
but rather blooms throughout the skin of her face,
as though it's always lurking just beneath the surface.
You can see it down the bridge of her nose, on her chin,
and even nestled in certain shadows on her forehead.
So I'm going to use a combination of two blushes,
a lighter one and a more vibrant one.
I'm going to drape them across my cheeks
and place them wherever that pink color
re-emerges throughout the sitter's face.
(classical music resumes)
- [Cecilia Voiceover] Critics identified portraiture
with women and with effeminacy,
charging that the genre was frivolous,
tainted by commerce and market demands,
and that it served above all
to flatter the vanity of the weaker sex.
Availing themselves of the homology
between the act of applying makeup
and the act of representing a woman's likeness,
both forms of face painting,
these critics decried portraitists like Nattier
for painting what was already painted,
casting them as nothing more than makeup artists.
- My oh my what a look.
(laughs)
So all that's left to do is the lips.
And I think there's something really cheeky
about the way that the corners of her mouth are curling up.
Her lips are deceptively simple looking.
They seem pretty straightforward,
but it's actually going to take a few steps
to make my lips look like hers.
Most of that has to do with the shape of her mouth.
Her top lip is thinner than mine
and her bottom lip, although it is fairly full,
is shorter than her top lip.
I'm going to have to conceal the outer corners
of my bottom lip and manipulate the shape of my top lip
to make it look thinner in order to
convincingly replicate her mouth.
And once I do that, I'll finish everything off
with a coat of bright, corally pink lipstick.
(record scratch sound effect)
- [Cecilia Voiceover] In reviewing this footage,
I'm noticing that my lips came out
quite a bit darker than the sitter's lips.
So if you are in fact intent on replicating the portrait,
I'd suggest using a much lighter lipstick than I did.
Eighteenth century critics' objections to makeup
can be aptly summarized by a line
from a contemporaneous satirical dictionary that quips,
"There is no one more skilled
in the art of painting than a coquettish woman.
She paints in such a way as to give an air of truth
to that which is nothing but lies and makeup."
In light of this, Nattier's portrait,
a painted depiction of a painted lady
that now stands in for an identity lost to time,
might invite us to consider what it is
to be real or true in the realm of representation.
- And with that, I think that just about does it.
(laughs)
I think this look is complete.
I'll cut to a side-by-side comparing this look
and the original portrait in just a moment.
But before I do that, I'd like to thank you
very much for watching as I attempted to turn myself
into a facsimile of eighteenth century French nobility.
I hope you enjoyed watching this video
and I hope you learned something.
Make sure to check out this incredible portrait
next time you visit The Met.
Until then!
(classical music resumes)
- [Cecilia Voiceover] Many thanks to David Pullins,
the European Paintings Department at The Met,
and to everybody else who helped make this video a reality.