An intimate warmth dominates, ‘The Shop Girl” as the shaded interior makes the viewer an elite insider. Whereas, the black-clad girl opening the shop’s door onto a lively Paris street is the focal point of the work. In the interior, a hushed serenity, and stillness is achieved through the muted value of light and the gentle shadows on the shop girl’s face. Consequently, Toots’s traces on the young lady with soft, eave lines define curvatures of each muscle in long, unbroken brushstrokes to convey stability and fluidity, decipherable of the Parisian streets outside.
Although wearing an amalgamating perplexed black dress, we are able to pinpoint where the waistline of the young lady adjoins her thighs and knees through her corset, as we are able to supplement Toots’s sensual rendering of the woman figure. The outdoors are hustling and bustling, with streets of people and is illustrated through Toots’s slapdash technique, with short brush strokes suggesting an immense accumulation of tension. Taoist has abandoned altogether the sweep of a broad brush, and builds up his masses by a succession of hatched strokes with a small brush for the background.
This direction of the brush strokes is carried through without regard to the contours of the objects and to the atmosphere. This technique is repeated in the red and white strokes that are strictly parallel, almost entirely rectilinear, and slant from right to left as they descend in on the awning of the other shops opposite to the boutique. Much realism is given to the light used by Taoist, which touches the movement of the object in order to be brilliant. The back image of the paint serves as the background of the subject with its explicit yet efficacious hard edges.
The room is dimly lit, and light is scattered outside on the streets and reflects in onto the subject, creating a sense of depth. Although modestly clothed in a uniform-like attire, as the two saleswomen are dressed identically, Taoist emphasizes their figures, especially on the curved, robust waistline to the breasts of the woman whom is fetching a box from a shelf, like fetching attention from the peculiar passer-by. Soft, shallow curves recall the curves of the youthful figures and have a pleasing, sensual laity and a softening effect on the composition overall.
In this period, a woman working outside her home was deliberated as morally dubious as the leering man and the vantage of the viewer can likewise imply that more than just the dresses are on sale. The Parisian shop in question seems to specialist in lace and trimmings, hardly catering to male customers by sight, as one is left to interpret the possibilities that the viewer or departing customer, we are conceived within the painting to be a women, in which the signs of voluptuous and erotic invitation embodied in the saleswomen would seem inexplicable.
Conversely,the claims to the realism in the painting, from its accuracy of detail, to the effort at documentation present in the painting merely disguises the fact that as a space, or a shop available to women than men. Taoist may only experience that space via a fantasy of authority and control as the artist, playing as commodities or confections. Store) While Taoist can only imagine male access to the space of the lace shop in terms of such a fiction hinging on a titillating transvestitism of the viewing subject, the somberly clad saleswomen contrasts with the tumble f pink ribbons on the countertops revealing or proposing, that the high- buttoned girl with her arms raised, could just as easily become “undone” as the pink coils of mess left on the counter met by the glare of the maneuvering male, with another male companion with a sly facial expression in the top hat on the other side of the door.
On a closer inspection, we are left to the torso of the male customer that is deliberately replaced with the female mannequins’, conflating of the shop interior and street, and the selling of fabrics and bodies is not a mistakable response. Toots’s painting also opportunely contains other elements that could allude to hidden, romantic pleasures that is teaming with fabrics, and textiles that invites tack-like responses from the viewers, inviting us to rummage through the rhythmic ,flowing ribbons.
Such as the cupped ‘V’ of the rosy package pointing to the girl’s lap where there lays a barely identifiable pouch on her mannequin-like corset; the wooden gargoyle lasciviously flicking his forked tongue towards the opened door (feasibly, to lure us the viewers in; and the ribbon craftily fallen into a heart shape on the floor baser a form of desire, ND the awning of the shop that resembles tongues to barely contained lust. (Hag) By the second half of the nineteenth century, it was generally believed that respectable young women of the middle classes were mimicking the styles and manners of the deem-monde.
Therefore, women are impeccably dressed, like objects to be addressed at, noticeable from the high fashion of a distant women in the middle ground. The use of ribbons is repetitive on the women’s neck as a choker, and on her headpiece, possibly indicating that like the gargoyles, the saleswomen are seen as objects, or clothing that are only imitations as the Oman from a higher place in society passes with her eyes demurely averted to the men that are “window shopping”.
Like doppelgängers, the shop girls may be alluding to the fact that even though these working girls give the illusion that they are of the same class as the men they are ‘serving, in reality, they are removed from it. (Undone: The Clever Pups) Thus this blurs, and obscures the necessary visual distinctions between the pure and the fallen.
