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JEAN JACQUES HENNER (French 1829-1905) Ideal Head, circa 1879 Oil on panel 13-1/2 x 10 inches (34.3 x 25.4 cm) Signed lower right Exhibition: Mississippi Museum of Art, Collectors Choice, 1978-79. The model for this painting is most likely Dolly Tennant, a Victorian neoclassical painter and student of Henner's, who was married to the African explorer Henry Morton Stanley Tennant. Dolly Tennant frequently modeled for Henner, and posed for La Source , arguably one of Henner's most famous works which won him great notoriety when it was first exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1881. The Musée national Jean-Jacques Henner preserves a number of oil studies for La Source , among them a study of Dolly Tennant's head which has certain affinities with the present work, although it is comparatively sketchier and less finished. (That work is reproduced in Isabelle de Lannoy, Musée national Jean-Jacques Henner. Catalogue des peintures, 2nd revised ed., Paris, 2003, cat. no. 301, p. 174.) Tennant's long red hair and flawless pale complexion also appealed to the Victorian painter, George Frederic Watts (1817-1904), for whom she also posed.