The Reluctant Bride

The Reluctant Bride (French: La Fiancée Hésitante, sometimes translated as "The Hesitant Fiancée" or "The Hesitant Betrothed") is an 1866 oil painting by Auguste Toulmouche. The painting measures 65 x and is signed and dated "A. Toulmouche / 1866".

Toulmouche had found success as a genre painter in an Academic style by 1866, winning medals at the Paris Salon for paintings depicting fashionable women in luxurious interiors, described by Émile Zola as "Toulmouche's delicious dolls" (French: "délicieuses poupées de Toulmouche").

Departing from Toulmouche's usual paintings of a single woman, this work is a more complicated composition showing a group of women in an opulently decorated room. At the centre, a young woman is seated in a flowing white satin silk dress with high collar trimmed with white fur. She stares out at the viewer, with an ambivalent expression that has attracted various interpretations. She is attended by two women of similar age: the woman to the left in a blue-grey satin gown with a patterned shawl bends to kiss her forehead, while the woman to the right in burnt orange velvet gown is crouching to hold her left hand. A girl stands to the right, looking in a mirror as she tries on a bridal headdress of orange blossom, echoing the central figure's bouquet.

The scene may be set in shortly before the wedding of the central young woman, waiting in a parlour or drawing room with her bridesmaids. Her expression may express hostility, or perhaps resignation to her arranged marriage. The figures congregate in the lower half of the canvas, with upper half devoted to the flamboyantly decorated room and its gilded furniture.

The painting was put up for sale at Christie's in New York in October 1990, and again at Sotheby's in New York in April and October 2005, and is held in a private collection. The Sotheby's auction catalogue suggests it may have been exhibited in Paris at the 1866 Salon, and at the 1867 Exposition Universelle.

The work came to public attention in late 2023 when it was used to express women's anger on TikTok: a version accompanied by excepts of the Dies Irae from Verdi's Requiem was quickly viewed over 6 million times.