Emmanuelle Pellet - La main tendue

Emmanuelle Pellet - The Outstretched Hand
Acrylic painting on cardboard
Height: 22 cm, Width: 19.5 cm
Unique piece, hand-painted, signed and numbered
The work illustrates a page from the children's album/CD Le Roi Crapaud (The Frog King), by the Brothers Grimm, which is included with the shipment.

About the work:

A princess, gold crown nestled in a mane of golden curls, stands at the edge of a pond bordered by reeds and water lilies. Her pink velvet dress, with wide sleeves, dominates the foreground and contrasts with the deep greens and blues of the aquatic vegetation. With her gaze lowered, arms crossed over her chest in a gesture of restraint and modesty, she watches a toad emerging from the calm waters, its head lifted toward her in silent expectation.
The composition draws its strength from this silent face-to-face between the child-sovereign and the amphibian creature — an obvious wink to the tale of the Frog Prince.
The princess’s face is inspired by a child painted by Rembrandt in Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph (1656, Gemäldegalerie, Kassel): the same rosy cheeks touched with a lively brush, the same softly oval profile, and the same thoughtful gravity in the expression, borrowed from the Dutch Golden Age child-portrait tradition. This pictorial lineage gives the face an almost timeless presence, deliberately offsetting the more free and naïve treatment of the reeds and water, painted with broad expressive strokes.
Thus, the artist orchestrates a dialogue between two textures — the classical refinement of the portrait and the spontaneous, almost childish, quality of the setting — to tell, under the traits of a familiar tale, a broader meditation on threshold, waiting, and the first gesture toward the other.

About the artist:

Art historian by training, Emmanuelle Pellet studied at the École du Louvre and then the Sorbonne, before passing the Agrégation in Visual 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 the history of art. Her creations have been exhibited in galleries in Paris, London, Singapore and Mauritius, and have been the subject of numerous publications. They are now represented in private collections in Europe, North America, Asia and the Indian Ocean.