Pouting fiancée gets a TikTok fan club
The sullen stare of The Hesitant Fiancée by Toulmouche Auguste has been taken up on social media as a feminist meme
All artists, regardless of the success they achieve in their lifetimes, must wish that their work will find new audiences after they are gone .
For Auguste Toulmouche, a 19th century French painter who studied upper class Parisian women, a new audience 130 years after his death has emerged in the most unlikely of places: the social media app TikTok.
One work has achieved a particular resonance with the women of TikTok, being repurposed and shared as a meme with a feminist message.
Toulmouche’s 1886 painting, The Hesitant Fiancée, depicts a young woman staring at the viewer, looking unimpressed at the husband her family has picked for her. Her gaze has now been interpreted as carrying a contemporary message of female independence and feminism.
