Commotion

A young couple in exaggerated eighteenth-century court dress - the boy in a black tricorn hat and olive coat, the girl in powdered curls topped with roses - stand close together against a bare, rose-bordered ground. The girl's enormous white skirt spreads out like a landscape, populated with a small herd of black-and-white cows, a leaping dog, and one tiny running figure.

Painted in soft, muted creams, olive greens, and dusty pink, the couple's large heads and doll-like faces are rendered smoothly, while the miniature cattle are drawn with flat, near-cartoon precision. The odd shift in scale between the formal couple and the tiny animals gives the scene a playful, surreal sense of commotion breaking into an otherwise still portrait.