Edwin Dickinson - Two Figures II

The same model posed for the man in An Anniversary and Two Figures II, 1921–23, again accompanied by a young woman, here appearing more mannikin-like because of her smoothed-out hair and features and her Hawthorne stare. Once again the proximity of the figures, now bunched up on the right side of the picture, sharpens the feeling of their psychological separation from each other that their exclusion from the visual field of their partner's gaze creates. Ward suggests that this lack of interaction, the age difference, the placement of the woman behind the man and to the side of the picture, combined with the contrast between the man's depiction in color and the woman's in monochrome may signify that she is the image of a remembered love, perhaps triggered by the smell of a rose that recalls the remembered smell of one she once held (a hard-to-see stem connects it to her hand). Similarly, the strongly lit head of the old man in An Anniversary and the placement of the other figures behind him may indicate that they are people recollected from his past, seen as they were remembered. If so, the age difference may be because of recollected youth. When Dickinson was seventy, he noted in his journal that he had dreamed of his mother as a young woman.