Young Lady with a Ball

In the Hammock and By the Fountain, the two paintings that seek to capture the nuanced approach to colour characteristic of traditional painting, were followed a year later by Young Lady with a Ball. The colours in this painting seem to be reduced to primary colours and create a clear impression, as does the structure of the picture itself: a dark starry sky on the background and an elegantly squatting girl in a fluffy skirt, looking straight towards us in the middle of a performance with a ball on the brightly lit (stage) floor. Here we can witness the other extreme of the way August shapes his images into pictures: by turning the rich tonality into laconic and simple, seemingly basic compositional structure.