Les soupirs embrasés (The Flaming Sighs or The Smouldering Sighs), 1998

Jacques Payette’s composition can be read as a meditation on art history itself: the persistence of classical form (through costume and drapery) set against its modern reinterpretation in Picasso’s portrait of Marie-Thérèse. 

The draped female figure, a studio prop with a high-waisted, empire-style silhouette with heavy folds falling in long vertical cascades relating closely to the language of antique statuary draws on a neoclassical late-18th/early-19th-century mode of dress. The fabric is arranged to emphasize volume, weight, and the sculptural articulation of cloth. This aligns with academic atelier traditions in which models were draped in pseudo-classical garments to evoke timelessness 

The juxtaposition with Picasso’s 1931 sculpture of Marie-Thérèse Walter is striking and intentional. Picasso’s bust belongs to the modernist reinvention of the classical head: smooth, biomorphic, and psychologically charged, yet derived from the antique bust format. By placing a neoclassically draped figure beside a distinctly 20th-century modernist sculpture, Payette creates a dialogue across time.

Payette’s warm, earthen palette—ochres, russets, and muted flesh tones—reinforces this sense of smouldering intensity. The painterly handling softens contours and blurs boundaries between figure, object, and space, allowing emotion to permeate the entire composition. The classical references introduce themes of timelessness and idealized form, yet the atmosphere is unmistakably modern and introspective.

Jacques Payette is a highly accomplished Montreal based artist who has been exhibiting regularly for 50 years. Les soupirs embrasés will be included in the soon to be launched book John R. Porter, Jacques Payette : artiste de l'intime et du temps qui passe (Québec: Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 2026).