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Woman Seen from the Back
Salted paper print from glass negative, 39.4 x 31 cm, by Vicomte Onésipe Aguado de las Marismas, c. 1862
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
 

Neither simply a portrait nor a fashion study, the image also functions as a playful joke. Aguado's light-hearted spirit emerges alongside his ongoing experiments in foreshortening, yet the result resists depth, presenting the sitter as something closer to a paper silhouette than a living presence. With the figure turned away, the composition recalls the spectral atmospheres found in works by Caspar David Friedrich and, later, René Magritte.