Emmanuelle Pellet - Le Roi Crapaud

Emmanuelle Pellet - The Frog King
Acrylic painting on cardboard
Height: 27.3 cm; Width: 20.5 cm
Unique piece, hand-painted, signed and numbered
The work is used for the cover, and one interior page, of the children's album/CD The Frog King, by the Brothers Grimm, which is included with the shipment.

About the work:

A crowned toad faces the viewer, but also a girl dressed in pink, arms raised in a gesture of fright or invocation, thanks to the mirror device that allows them to be placed on the same plane. This figure is caught between two flames of oversized candles, spurting forth like blades of light in the darkness of a gilded frame. The entire composition folds around this light source, which slices through faces, hands, and contours in a velvety shadow.

This work asserts an explicit homage to Georges de La Tour, master of the nocturnal chiaroscuro of the 17th century. As in Madeleine by the Nightlight or The Newborn, the flame here is not a mere decorative element but the true subject of the painting: it organizes space, sculpts faces in warm, enveloping light, and establishes that atmosphere of silent, almost sacred contemplation characteristic of the Lorraine painter. La Tour painted vigil scenes where the candle revealed as much as it concealed; here, this tension between unveiling and mystery is taken up and playfully distorted — the illuminated figure is no longer a saint or a servant, but a lost princess, while the crowned toad, a mischievous sentinel of the tale, oversees the foreground of this chiaroscuro scene borrowed from Baroque contrast.

Born to illustrate for children, the work carries within it the full gravitas of European tenebrism, reinvented to tell children — and adults — that sometimes a single candle is enough to bring light out of darkness, and perhaps to redeem good from evil...

About the artist:

An art historian by training, Emmanuelle Pellet studied at the École du Louvre and then at the Sorbonne, before passing the Agrégation in Plastic Arts (3rd place). After several years of teaching, she joined the Louvre Museum as head of educational outreach.

Her career today fuels 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.