Why would a sitter pose holding a pair of gloves instead of wearing them? For centuries, fine gloves were costly, so a pair carried in the hand showed wealth and rank without a word of explanation.
Over nearly four centuries, painters made that accessory say more. These twelve works include a falconer's working glove, a queen's favor pinned to a courtier's hat and a husband's pledge held out toward his wife on a second canvas.
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How These Were Chosen
A glove also gives a painter something to put in a sitter's hand. Worn, it is part of the costume. Held or pulled off, it becomes a gesture, and each choice says something different about the person in the picture.
As a patch of pale or dark leather, it also adds one more spot of light or shadow to place in the composition.
The twelve works kept here, most of them portraits, are those in which the glove carries part of the meaning. Take it away, and the picture loses something it was saying about a rank, a trade, a marriage or a single gesture.
The works run from 1498 to about 1878, and they are not in order of date. The list counts down to a portrait that takes its very name from a glove.
12. Edgar Degas, Singer with a Glove (about 1878)
At the top of this pastel by Edgar Degas, a singer throws her head back as her voice climbs, and one hand, sheathed in a black glove, rises beside her face.
Degas drew her about 1878, in the years he spent sketching the café-concerts of Paris, cafés where popular singers performed on a small stage for the crowd at the tables.
On a café-concert stage, the light came from below, from a row of lamps along its front edge. It reverses the shadows that daylight casts under the nose and chin. Here it catches the singer's chin and throat instead, and her face takes on an unfamiliar look.
Behind her, Degas set a backdrop of vertical stripes in cream, coral, green and golden yellow. Against that busy background the glove holds its ground. Degas repeated its black in the fur that edges her sleeve, and the dark leather keeps its sharp outline against the stripes.
That raised hand also gave the picture its second name. Its main title is Chanteuse de café, the café singer, but it is also known in French as La chanteuse au gant, the singer with the glove.
At a Glance
Artist: Edgar Degas (1834 to 1917)
Painted: About 1878
Medium: Pastel on canvas
Size: 53.2 × 41 cm (21 × 16 in)
Where to see it: Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts
11. Frans Hals, Portrait of a Man holding Gloves (about 1645)
Lifted slightly in the sitter's left hand, a pair of gloves is the only thing Frans Hals gave this man to hold in a portrait painted about 1645. Hals worked in Haarlem, in the Dutch Republic, where merchants and their wives came to him for lively, quickly brushed likenesses.
This man's name has been lost, and Hals left few other clues about him. Only the way he handles those gloves says who he was in the painter's eyes.