Standing Woman

Gaston Lachaise met his lifelong muse and future wife, Isabel Dutaud Nagle, after he began working in Paris in 1903. Lachaise’s adoration of Isabel provided the inspiration for the heroic female figures that dominated the sculptor’s career. Standing Woman presents an idealized female form whose exaggerated and undulating volume evokes a powerful example of womanhood. Larger than life and sensuously robust, the figure nonetheless balances delicately on her tiptoes, seeming to float with a mysterious disregard for the restrictions of human physicality. The sculpture, then, harmonizes a tribute to a very real woman with a beautifully idealized monumentality.