Emmanuelle Pellet - Les cigognes et leurs bébés

Emmanuelle Pellet - The Storks and Their Babies
Acrylic painting on cardboard
Height: 21 cm Width: 29.4 cm
Unique work, hand-painted, signed and numbered
The work has been published in a youth album, The Mirror of Your Dreams, which is included with the shipment.

About the work:

In a shadowy ambiance worthy of the great Dutch chiaroscuro, the artist stages a kindly king with a plump silhouette, a stork with impressive wingspan, and an infant crying in its wicker cradle. The lateral, dense, dramatic lighting cuts the contours with an intensity all Rembrandt-esque — an homage to the master of chiaroscuro, here playfully diverted with a mischievous tenderness.

The humor arises from the contrast between the pictorial gravity of the treatment and the lightness of the subject: this king, wrapped in his furs and velvets, with an oversized royal keffiyeh fixed on his head, addresses the stork, pointing with his scepter to the cradle at his feet.

The stork animates the composition with the breadth of its suspended flight; the bright red of its beak and legs contrasts with the browns and dull greens of the setting, while the midnight-blue cradle on the right closes the scene with a note of childlike tenderness — the baby waving its arms at this improbable ballet of which it is the stake.

About the artist:

Art historian by training, Emmanuelle Pellet studied at the École du Louvre and then at the Sorbonne, before passing the Agrégation in Fine Arts (3rd place). After several years of teaching, she joined the Louvre Museum as head of educational outreach.
Her career today feeds a personal body of work where painting mastery dialogues with a deep culture of images and art history. Her creations have been exhibited in galleries in Paris, London, Singapore, and Mauritius, and have been the subject of numerous publications. They are now part of private collections in Europe, North America, Asia, and the Indian Ocean.