Maquettes for ‘a child plucking a rose’

The maquettes serve as sketches, experiments towards resolving ideas for a transcription of Caspar Netscher’s 1669 painting in the Wallace Collection. The key points of the work are the child, her hands, the rose and the colour of the dress. In particular because these reflect the content of Netscher’s young woman playing a guitar, widely regarded as a companion piece – the dresses are the same style, and the same colour in essence (the catalogue descriptions of the colour are different).

Of the issues to resolve the most prominent is the translation from 2d to 3d, the invention of the reverse face and the 360 degree view. The maquettes sketch out various options for this without presuming to provide a specific solution. If they provide anything that is taken into the final piece it is a series of gestures when building that scale up into a solution. If a maquette were a pure scale model it would be given to someone else to build. They might better be described as practice for the process of building.

As the series grows the problem becomes the juxtaposition of the dress, representing the child, and the rose. How to place the rose in a position to be picked. The pieces use clay, acrylic sheet, paper, cardboard, wood fence panels, wire, acetate and drawn elements to solve these problems.