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The modern young woman looks out at us confidently. With her legs casually crossed and a lit cigarette between her fingers, she has an almost seductive quality. Oscar Zwintscher, originally from Leipzig, painted her portrait in 1904 – a time when cigarettes were connotated masculine. A woman who smoked was thought at least unseemly, if not a ‘femme fatale’.

In that era, an emancipated woman was commonly regarded as a threat to men, and yet, at the same time, a temptress. But is this young woman with her unassuming hairstyle and her unadorned black dress a threat? What is she thinking? And what is she feeling? What does her direct, open gaze mean?

The Lady with a Cigarette is sometimes referred to as the Albertinum’s Sistine Madonna, since just like Raphael’s famous work, she also has a strangely powerful aura of attraction. Even today, we do not know the name of the model in Oskar Zwintscher’s painting. At that time, he was teaching at the Dresden Academy of Art, and was much in demand as a portrait painter. Curator Andreas Dehmer describes Zwintscher as:

“.. always a bit of a loner. He created a furore when he came to Dresden, especially due to portraits like this – very naturalistic, yet also with a symbolic quality in the truest sense of the word, since they always retain an ambiguity making it impossible to read them unequivocally.”

Zwintscher was an exceptionally painstaking artist. In his Portrait of a Lady with Cigarette, he proved himself to be a virtuoso of the colour black. The woman’s dress is black, as is the velvet curtain behind her. The patterns and folds in the fabric shimmer in the light. Only the young woman’s mouth is red – just like the tip of her cigarette.