Variations on a Theme: Berthe Morisot's Reinterpretation of The

Home , 1886 in art, Autumn (Manet), Gustave Caillebotte, Pink and Blue (Renoir)

“Variations on a Theme: Berthe Morisot‟s Reinterpretation of the „Woman at the Piano‟ Motif in Her Images of Girls at the Piano, 1888-1892”

A thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Art History

Committee Members: Dr. Theresa Leininger-Miller (chair) Dr. Morgan Thomas Dr. Julie Aronson

May, 2011

Erin E. Ehresmann B.A., St. Cloud State University, May 2008

ABSTRACT

In this study, I examine Le Piano (1888) and Lucie Léon au Piano (1892) by Berthe

Morisot (1841-1895) and the significant ways in which these two paintings depart from the established tradition of female piano portraiture in nineteenth-century France. Charlotte

Eyerman has explored the importance of the “woman at the piano” theme and its role in the construction of femininity but limits her study to the work of male artists. Morisot‟s piano portraits offer an unusual female perspective on a theme primarily created and perpetuated by male artists. My analysis elucidates the manner in which these works drew upon the tradition of the woman at the piano motif and the specific ways in which the artist subverted the passivity and superficiality that characterized male-produced versions of the theme. Le Piano evokes the tradition of female bourgeois education in nineteenth-century France and the importance of the piano in the development of femininity. However, Morisot enriched the commonplace act of playing the piano with an intellectualism not part of the superficial, socially-ordained reasons for playing in a unique manner that was largely absent from its representations in visual tradition. In

Le Piano, by painting the confident figure of her daughter, Julie, nonchalantly leaning on the piano and looking out at the viewer as her cousin, Jeannie Gobillard, plays, Morisot communicated the fulfilling and enjoyable role music-making played in these girls‟ lives. In

Lucie Léon au Piano, the visual emphasis of the tensed musculature of Léon‟s hands and arms invites associations with the conventions of male piano portraiture. While female pianists were generally prized for their charm and delicacy, male pianists, especially the male virtuoso, were conceived of as powerful, insightful, and active musicians. Morisot departed from the static and amateurish qualities common in the woman at the piano motif to create images whose subjects are physically engaged with the act of making music. In both Le Piano and Lucie Léon au

Piano, Morisot reversed the conventional subject/beholder relationship. Not only do her pianists look directly out at viewers, thereby denying the right to look without being seen, but the concomitant flattening of pictorial space and insistence of the medium itself confronts the beholder. Drawing upon Michael Fried‟s theory of “facingness,” I posit that Morisot‟s painterly technique and self-aware subjects work in tandem to create entirely new and assertive images of woman at the piano scenes in the late nineteenth-century Impressionist milieu. Through Le

Piano and Lucie Léon au Piano, Morisot articulated a fresh pictorial vocabulary of female pianism that emphasized agency and self-awareness over the traditional measures of femininity.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks go to the art history faculty at the University of Cincinnati for sharing their enthusiasm and knowledge of the field with me over the past two years. I want to extend my gratitude especially to my advisor, Dr. Theresa Leininger-Miller, for guiding me through the process of thesis-writing and graduate school as a whole. She has been supportive of my ideas and ambitions since the beginning, and I am grateful to have worked with someone who is also interested in exploring the intersection of visual culture and music. Her insightful comments and unsurpassed editorial skills have helped foster my nascent ideas into a full-fledged thesis. Dr.

Julie Aronson and Dr. Morgan Thomas also deserve recognition and thanks for donating their time and expertise as committee members. Their varied points of view and discerning criticism are invaluable resources to me. Thanks also to Dr. Lynne Ambrosini for kindly offering to serve as an alternate reader.

Many thanks to my classmates for being such wonderful companions through the ups and downs of graduate school. It would have been much less fun without them. Cindy Damschroder has also been a great bastion of emotional support and practical advice for me, whether I was plodding through a never-ending stack of undergraduate art history essays or agonizing about qualifying exams. I am so grateful for all the opportunities and guidance she has given me in my two years as her teaching assistant.

I also want to express my love and gratitude to my family for their unwavering support of all my endeavors, whether I dreamed of being a concert pianist or an art historian. I still love my grand piano, Mom and Dad. Megan, I appreciate you taking time away from your own graduate studies to commiserate with me about school. I will return the favor when you are writing your dissertation.

And finally, to Max I owe a great many thanks. You have been a voice of reason and encouragement when times got tough. I couldn‟t have done it without you.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ………………………………………………………………………...viii

INTRODUCTION ……………………………………………………………………………………1

CHAPTER ONE Poise, Grace, and Charm: The Cultivation of Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France and Morisot‟s Le Piano, 1888 ………………………………………………………………………...7

CHAPTER TWO Constructions of Pianism and Morisot‟s Lucie Léon au Piano, 1892 …………………………..24

CHAPTER THREE Morisot‟s Piano Girls in the Age of Impressionism …………………………………………….38

CONCLUSION ……………………………………………………………………………………..50

IMAGES …………………………………………………………………………………………..54

BIBLIOGRAPHY …………………………………………………………………………………..78

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1 7 Figure 1: Berthe Morisot, Le Piano, 1888, oil on canvas, 25 /2 x 31 /8 in., private collection, New York, New York

7 3 Figure 2: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, The Kaunitz Sisters, 1818, graphite, 11 /8 x 8 /4 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York

Figure 3: Achille Devéria, Prelude, 1832, lithograph, in Journal des Femmes, dimensions unknown, Musée Carnavelet, Paris

Figure 4: Victor Coindre, untitled illustration for sheet music “Maria, Romance,” n.d., lithograph, dimensions unknown, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris

Figure 5: Advertisement for “Musique en 30 lecons,” 1845, lithograph, dimensions unknown, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris

3 1 Figure 6: Berthe Morisot, Two Girls at the Piano, n.d., charcoal, 17 /4 x 20 /2 in., location unknown

1 1 Figure 7: Berthe Morisot, Julie Écoutant, 1888, oil on canvas, 24 /2 x 18 /2 in., private collection, New York, New York

5 Figure 8: Berthe Morisot, Julie Écoutant, 1888, oil on canvas, 21 /8 x 15 in., private collection, Paris

5 7 Figure 9: Berthe Morisot, Le Piano, 1888, pastel on paper, 25 /8 x 31 /8 in., private collection, Paris

1 3 Figure 10: Berthe Morisot, Le Mandoline, 1889, oil on canvas, 22 /2 x 21 /4 in., private collection

Figure 11: Marguerite Gerard, La Leçon de Piano, 1780s, oil on canvas, 18 x 15 in., location unknown

1 1 Figure 12: Berthe Morisot, Lucie Léon au Piano, 1892, oil on canvas, 25 /2 x 31 /2 in., private collection, Michigan

Figure 13: János Jankó, Franz Liszt at the Piano, in Borsszem Jankó (April 6, 1873), dimensions unknown

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1 Figure 14: Gustave Caillebotte, Young Man Playing the Piano, 1876, oil on canvas, 31 /2 x 45 7 /10 in., private collection

5 Figure 15: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Young Woman at the Piano, 1876, oil on canvas, 36 /8 x 29 1 /8 in., the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

Figure 16: Félix Vallotton, Le Piano, plate IV from the series Six Musical Instruments, 1896, 5 3 woodcut, 12 /8 x 9 /8 in., Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York

1 5 Figure 17: Berthe Morisot, Lucie Léon au Piano, 1892, oil on canvas, 25 /2 x 21 /8 in., location unknown

1 5 Figure 18: Berthe Morisot, Lucie Léon au Piano, 1892, oil on canvas, 25 /2 x 23 /8 in., private collection, Paris

3 1 Figure 19: James McNeill Whistler, At the Piano, 1858-1859, oil on canvas, 26 /8 x 36 /8 in., Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, Ohio

1 1 Figure 20: Paul Cézanne, Tannhaüser Overture, c. 1869, oil on canvas, 29 /2 x 36 /5 in., Hermitage Museum, Russia

9 4 Figure 21: Gustave Caillebotte, The Piano Lesson, 1881, oil on canvas, 31 /10 x 24 /5 in., Musée Marmottan, Paris

5 3 Figure 22: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Girls at the Piano, 1892, oil on canvas, 45 /8 x 35 /8 in., Musée d‟Orsay, Paris

1 Figure 23: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, The Piano Lesson, c. 1889, oil on canvas, 22 x 18 /8 in., Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska

Figure 24: Louise Abbéma, Au Piano, c. 1880, oil on canvas, dimensions unknown, location unknown

INTRODUCTION

Berthe Morisot (1841-1895), a founding member of the French Impressionists, is primarily known for her representations of women and children engaged in the private, everyday activities of Parisian bourgeois life. The focus of my study involves a very small subset of her work, images of girls at the piano, which never has been the sole subject of a concentrated analysis. The piano had a widespread presence in nineteenth-century consciousness and became a prevalent theme in literature and visual culture. Popular images, as well as high art, clearly defined the instrument‟s emblematic associations with femininity, a construction disseminated by the male majority of professional image makers. I have analyzed and discussed Morisot‟s piano paintings in terms of this broader nineteenth-century “woman at the piano” motif, drawing comparisons from a large body of piano portraits that highlight Morisot‟s unusual treatment of the theme from a female artistic viewpoint.

OVERVIEW

Critics praised Morisot during her life for her quintessentially “feminine” style, characterized by soft colors, feathery brushstrokes, and an ineffable charm supposedly intrinsic to the work of a female artist. She participated in all but one of the Impressionist exhibitions, and yet her enthusiastic involvement with these avant-garde artists was scarcely remembered until feminist art historians salvaged her name from the annals of second-tier artists to which posterity had unjustly consigned her.

Morisot was born into an upper-middle-class Parisian life, which informed her predominantly bourgeois subject matter. Studies of her family members, especially her sisters and nieces, comprise a large portion of her early work. With the birth of her daughter, Julie

(1878-1964), Morisot‟s subject matter shifted almost exclusively to representations of her child

1 in a series that many Morisot scholars call a pictorial biography. The artist created between 125 and 150 portraits of her daughter over a sixteen-year period, an endeavor cut short by her own premature death at the age of fifty-four.1 Of these works, at least sixteen are devoted to the theme of Julie playing various musical instruments, often shown along with her cousin, Jeannie

Gobillard.

Contained within this category of musically-themed paintings, which include the violin, mandolin, and flute, is a further division: images of girls at the piano. This category is small, comprising only two finished works in Morisot‟s oeuvre. Yet the first of these pieces, Le Piano

(1888), captivated Morisot‟s attention so thoroughly that she created at least three oil sketches, one pastel, and eight drawings in preparation for the final version. The second work, Lucie Léon au Piano (1892), is not focused on Julie but instead depicts a young girl who was training to be a concert pianist. These two pieces have been treated to an extensive analysis in the literature only once,2 and never have they been contextualized as part of a broader theme—the woman at the piano motif—that was the subject of hundreds of images in nineteenth-century France. Seen against this backdrop, Morisot‟s works emerge as foils, subverting the hegemonic attitude implicit in this predominantly male-produced iconographic tradition.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Early writers on Morisot described her work almost exclusively in terms of biography, portraying her as a poised bourgeois woman whose work paralleled her life of leisure and middle-class comforts. Family and friends authored much of the early writings on her career, which was steeped in historical mistruths, omissions, and personal bias. Such is the case in

Armand Fourreau‟s Berthe Morisot (1925), the first biography about the artist, the opening line

1 Anne Higonnet, Berthe Morisot’s Images of Women (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 212-13. 2 Robert Hopson, “The Symbolist Portraiture of Berthe Morisot” (Ph.D. diss., The University of Iowa, 2002), 222- 283.

2 of which sets the tone of the work: “The life of Berthe Morisot, like some very sheltered lake which no storms have ever stirred, was calm, straightforward, and of a piece with her Art.”3 This vision of calm is further repeated in Morisot‟s letters, first published in 1959 by the artist‟s grandson, Denis Rouart. The publication is by no means a complete set, and some scholars have questioned whether Rouart‟s editing reflected a desire to cast his family history in a favorable light.4 This placid conception of Morisot‟s art and existence, her oeuvre defined primarily through biography, was consistent with writing on other women artists and persisted until the latter part of the 1980s. More recently, scholarship has opened up to include various methodological approaches to her work, notably in the numerous writings by feminist art historian, Anne Higonnet.

Morisot‟s paintings of music-making seldom have been studied thematically. The only scholar who has extensively analyzed Morisot‟s musical works as an independent set is Robert

Hopson in his dissertation, “The Symbolist Portraiture of Berthe Morisot” (2002). In his chapter devoted to Morisot‟s musical paintings, Hopson promoted the connections between Morisot‟s aesthetics, subject matter, and avant-garde Symbolist ideas. He briefly touched on the importance of the artist‟s choice to use a piano as the main subject in Le Piano, the first of her musically-themed paintings, writing that this portrait “challenged iconographic conventions relating the nature of feminine identity, the content and character of women‟s lives, directly to late nineteenth-century ideas and ideals of domesticity.”5 However, his dissertation contained little discussion of what constituted standard piano iconography, and the specific and significant ways in which Morisot‟s work departed from conventional piano portraits. Charlotte Eyerman

3 Armand Fourreau, Berthe Morisot, trans. H. Wellington (New York, NY: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1925), 7. 4 Margaret Shennan, Berthe Morisot: The First Lady of Impressionism (Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing Limited, 1996), xv. 5 Hopson, 234.

3 provided an extensive examination of this tradition, as well as the piano‟s significance in nineteenth-century French culture, in her dissertation, “The Composition of Femininity: The

Significance of the „Woman at the Piano‟ Motif in Nineteenth-Century Culture from Daumier to

Renoir” (1997). Her arguments, however, focus solely on male-produced images of this theme, ignoring the few female artists who produced examples as well. To my knowledge there are few extant examples of this subject in the work of professional female artists of the modern and early modern periods. The French artist, Louise Abbéma (1853-1927), and the Italian Renaissance painter, Sofonisba Anguissola (1532-1625), both produced female piano-player portraits, but their representations were traditional in their adherence to established iconography, which above all emphasized the passivity of the female pianist. Morisot‟s work was unique in its departure from tradition, and I have endeavored to elucidate the ways in which her novel treatment of the theme challenged the largely male-constructed pictorial language of the woman at the piano.

CHAPTERS

I have examined Morisot‟s piano paintings in three chapters using predominantly feminist, socio-historical, iconographic, and formalist methodologies to facilitate a deeper reading of these works in the broader context of the woman-piano theme. I have also included biographical details to highlight the importance of Le Piano and Lucie Léon au Piano to the artist herself. In order to develop the history of the woman at the piano motif and other expressions of pianism in French visual culture, I have included both genre scenes and portraits of pianists in my discussion. Although the purposes of genre painting and portraiture are undeniably different, both categories are influenced by the same set of conventions that stem from the cultural constructions of pianism in the nineteenth century.

In the first chapter I focus on the representation of Julie Manet and Jeannie Gobillard in

Le Piano, discussing the history of female bourgeois education and suitably feminine artistic pursuits, known in France as the arts d’agrément. Although the painting is a continuation of this educational system, Julie‟s penetrating gaze challenges the passivity of traditional representations of female musical education. Morisot emphasized her self-awareness, intellect, and individualism in ways that surpass the modest intellectual achievements expected of women.

In chapter two I examine Lucie Léon au Piano, opening the work to a broader discussion of female amateurism and male professionalism. A comparison of Morisot‟s depiction of Léon with images of male pianists, composers, and virtuosi, such as Gustave Caillebotte‟s intense

Young Man Playing the Piano (1876) and Félix Vallotton‟s Le Piano (1896), highlight the artist‟s unusual compositional choices for this female image. In the final chapter I situate both

Le Piano and Lucie Léon au Piano within the context of French representations of women at the piano, focusing on the art of Morisot‟s Impressionist peers. Drawing upon the theories of vision and space by feminist art historian Griselda Pollock and the formalist theories of Michael Fried, I contrast Morisot‟s representational choices with those of her male colleagues. Morisot‟s representations of assertive female pianists become antithetical to male constructions of proper femininity and passivity as epitomized by women‟s presence at the piano.

SIGNIFICANCE

In the visual arts, the appearance of keyboard instruments such as the clavichord and harpsichord date as far back as the Renaissance, predating the eighteenth-century invention of the piano. The piano, however, engrained itself more thoroughly in the fabric of middle-class society and became an enticingly modern genre subject for nineteenth-century artists devoted to the depiction of everyday life. The predominance of female piano portraiture emerged from the

5 instrument‟s significant position in a bourgeois woman‟s life, and the compositional and aesthetic conventions within this genre embodied contemporary values concerning women‟s cultural roles, which were chiefly determined by men. A woman‟s interpretation of this subject matter has been largely unexplored, and Morisot‟s depictions of girls at the piano form an important counterpart to the myriad expressions of the woman at the piano motif in high art and popular imagery.

CHAPTER ONE

Poise, Grace, and Charm: The Cultivation of Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France and Morisot’s Le Piano, 1888

You know that pianoforte playing, though suitable to everyone, is yet more particularly one of the most charming and honorable accomplishments for young ladies, and, indeed, for the female sex in general. By it we can command, not only for one‟s self, but for many others, a dignified and appropriate amusement…6

Two young girls are seated at a piano, caught in a moment of friendly music-making.

The foremost child sits erect and intensely stares at the music before her as she plays, her mouth slightly open in earnest concentration. Seated to her right is the figure of another girl, who insouciantly rests her elbow directly on the keyboard, her head in her hand and her gaze trained directly on the viewer. On the painting‟s surface, this is a lighthearted genre scene of two girls enjoying the act of making music together. But Le Piano (1888) (Fig. 1), by Berthe Morisot, can be read as something more: a continuation of a centuries-long tradition of illustrating the commonplace subject of female figures at the piano. This theme, as art historian Charlotte

Eyerman has termed it, is something of a cipher, a message that requires decoding to fully comprehend its significance.7 Taken as a whole, such works tell the viewer of the familiar presence of the piano in society, its association with primarily women, and its importance to the development of bourgeois feminine identity. The decoded message conveys society‟s construction of ideal femininity, embodied by an upright, decorous woman at the piano.

Conversely, Morisot‟s expressions of the motif, both this example and another from 1892, eschewed the sentimental affect embedded in this tradition. Instead, her females at the piano are

6 Carl Czerny (1791-1857), Letters, n.d., quoted in James Parakilas, et al., Piano Roles: Three Hundred Years of Life with the Piano (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 144. 7 Charlotte Nalle Eyerman, “The Composition of Femininity: The Significance of the „Woman at the Piano‟ Motif in Nineteenth-Century French Culture from Daumier to Renoir” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1984), 12.

7 self-aware and intelligent, not idly engaged in the activity of music-making but active melodic producers for their own pleasure and edification. Morisot‟s departure from tradition is perhaps less surprising when one considers the fact that the woman at the piano motif long had been primarily in the hands of male image-makers. Her distinctive representations resulted from a vision informed by her own experiences as a bourgeois woman and her desire to lend an air of importance to the “charming” activities of genteel young ladies, which may have ultimately stemmed from her unconventional status as a working female artist in a society that prescribed amateurism for women in the realm of art as well as music.

The theme of playing the piano has appeared in visual culture since the instrument‟s invention at the beginning of the eighteenth century.8 In the nineteenth century, this subject grew in popularity, and it appeared not only in high art but in mass visual culture as well. In

1802, the invention and patenting of the upright piano, a far more compact design than the grand, brought the instrument into the domestic interior.9 The piano‟s presence in the homes of middle and upper class families, and its subsequent integration into daily domestic routines, correlates with the explosion of piano portrayals. Found in fashion plates, advertisements, and sheet music, these images, through their widespread distribution, etched this subject into the public consciousness. There is a noticeable thread that runs through almost all of these representations of the subject, in both high and low art: the figure or figures seated at the piano are nearly always female, highlighting the piano‟s prevalence in the lives of bourgeois domestic women. In the middle and upper echelons of French society, female youths were expected to undertake a prescribed program of study of domestic and artistic skills, known as the arts d’agrément, which

8 Images of women at instruments, such as the harpsichord and clavichord, both of which were in existence since the late Middle Ages to early Renaissance, were precursors to the “woman at the piano” theme seen in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These precedents, especially seventeenth-century Dutch works, interested later nineteenth- century Realists, Naturalists, and Impressionists. See Eyerman, 133-4. 9 Eyerman, 3.

8 would transform them into poised, acceptably cultured women. Central to this curriculum was the piano, which instilled in girls discipline and time management skills, as well as the ability to display their musical talents for family, friends, and potential suitors. The majority of woman- piano scenes evoke this cultural training, as do Morisot‟s representations of the theme.

However, Morisot‟s works, especially Le Piano, reveal her deep understanding of this tradition as a result of her own class background. The artist and her sister, Yves, both took piano lessons in their youth in accordance with their mother‟s wishes.10 Morisot‟s depictions of young women at the piano highlight the role of piano playing in middle and upper class culture and celebrate the intellectual and musical potential of women.

The Female Cultural Veneer

In the nineteenth century, bourgeois education was deeply rooted in the perceived intellectual disparities between men and women and their respective social and familial roles; thus, schooling was tailored to suit the needs of each gender. The only time this division of the sexes was dismissed rather than highlighted was in very early childhood. Until about age three or four, mothers treated their children alike, regardless of gender. As historian Michelle Perrot writes, “Early childhood was feminized: boys and girls wore dresses and long hair until age three or four and often longer, and they played freely underneath their mother‟s or a servant‟s skirts.”11

After the formative stages of childhood, however, gender differences were greatly emphasized, and boys and girls received separate educations that would prepare them for their respective roles in the family and in society. For a female child, this meant education in art and music, as well as

10 Morisot and Yves began taking piano lessons in 1855. Their first teacher was the eminent Camille Stamaty (1811-1870), who had also instructed Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) and Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869), both of whom would become respected composer-pianists. Shennan, 34. 11 Michelle Perrot, ed., A History of Private Life IV: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1990), 204.

9 domestic duties. Art historians Katherine Adler and Tamar Garb detail this educational division between the sexes:

Most public statements on education argued for a separate and different schooling for boys and girls, based not only on their different natures but on their concomitant social roles. While boys needed to be prepared for leadership, the pursuit of excellence, and public service, girls were to be groomed for a life of domestic responsibility, motherhood, appropriate subservience, piety, and gentle accomplishment in those arts deemed suitable, such as needlework, watercolour, and singing—les arts des femmes.12

For many girls, days were heavily regimented, filled with numerous lessons and studying, so that

“Toute heures a raison d‟être, encadrée à l‟intérieur de l‟emploi du temps.”13 A typical day for a young woman receiving private instruction included arithmetic, spelling, English, religious study, singing lessons, and one to two hours of piano practice.14 Young women were expected to cultivate these skills just enough to transform them into suitable wives and mothers, superficial accomplishments that gave them what Perrot aptly terms a “veneer of general culture.”15

From these general educational expectations rose the piano scene, a testament to the training a young woman had received, implied by her position at the piano. Many privately commissioned portraits of young girls situate them around the piano to indicate their level of cultural refinement, as in Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres‟ The Kaunitz Sisters (1818) (Fig. 2).

Commissioned by the Austrian ambassador, Prince Wenzel von Kaunitz-Rietberg, this work depicts his three daughters, Leopoldine, Caroline, and Ferdinandine, positioned around a piano.

The eldest girl stands behind the younger two, her arms crossed over the back edge of her sister‟s chair. The middle child stands to the side of the instrument with her left arm outstretched toward the music on the stand, her hand delicately poised as if just having turned the page. The

12 Kathleen Adler and Tamar Garb, Berthe Morisot (Oxford: Phaidon Press Limited, 1987), 10. 13 “Every hour has a reason for being, framed inside a schedule [my translation].” Marie-Françoise Lévy, De Mères en Filles: L’Education des Françaises, 1850-1880 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1984), 21. 14 Lévy, 22 15 Perrot, 309.

10 youngest is seated at the piano, languidly holding the fingers of her left hand over the keys in a gesture of absentminded playing as she pauses to pose for the artist. Here is a testament to the instrument‟s role in the cultured upbringing of women. The girls, positioned at the piano, represent youths in training. The eldest sister stands behind her two siblings as the exemplar of their sophisticated upbringing. All three girls look demurely at the viewer, their posture upright, embodiments of cultivated refinement through the study of music and piano, which ultimately served as a statement of their suitability for marriage.

This requisite cultural veneer was symptomatic of women‟s characteristic social position, that of an amateur. They were expected to remain dilettantes, never to cross over into the realm of the professional. Amateurism was relegated to the private confines of the home, while the realm of professionalism existed in the public sphere beyond domestic boundaries. Any woman‟s advance beyond a superficial cultural finish would necessitate her leaving the confines of her domicile and, by extension, her expected primary roles as wife and mother. Such transgression would threaten the sanctity of the family itself.

This emphasis on dilettantism rather than professionalism was more than a result of established gender roles; it also reflected nineteenth-century beliefs concerning female intellectual capacity. While man‟s supposed superiority to woman was a concept formed well before the nineteenth century, this epoch witnessed a desire to scientifically verify gender inequality through empirical evidence—“evidence” which was widely distributed through popular and scientific journals.16 Comparative studies of the size, weight, and appearance of

16 This impetus to scientifically prove the intellectual divisions between the sexes was in part a reaction to progressive women‟s movements of the late nineteenth century. Tamar Garb writes, “In the face of feminist agitation and the frightening spectre of la femme nouvelle, the findings of science were used by the conservative medical and anthropological establishments to corroborate the belief in the natural hierarchy of the sexes and the concomitant social roles of men and women.” See Tamar Garb, Sisters of the Brush: Women’s Artistic Culture in Late-Nineteenth Century Paris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 112-3.

11 male and female brains apparently yielded results that underscored woman‟s de facto inferiority to man. Garb elaborates:

Whilst white French men were shown to be intellectually advanced, women, it was held, were not fully equipped to deal with the superior mental functions, especially for abstract thought. It was in organizing thoughts, synthesising material and making judgements based on evidence, that women and people from „inferior races‟ were particularly stunted.17

Woman‟s lower place in the social hierarchy, then, was in part because of her apparent cognitive deficiencies. However, women were thought to exceed men in their sensitivity and emotional intelligence, which coincided with their primary roles as wives and mothers. On this subject, nineteenth-century theorist Alfred Fouillée alleged, “Woman‟s brain is now less capable of prolonged and intense intellectual efforts, but the reason is entirely creditable to her: her rôle

[sic] in the family involves a development of heart-life and moral force rather than of brain force and intellectual life.”18 The positions of wife and mother, according to contemporary beliefs, did not require an advanced intellect, and women‟s capacities instead had evolved with an emphasis on emotion and sensitivity. Any attempt to encourage female cognitive facilities beyond their natural capacity could be detrimental. Some theorists, Foillée included, warned that excessive development of the female intellect would lead to a diminishment of fertility and mothering skills.19 For France, the results could be disastrous, as Garb concludes, “The professionalisation of women … could be said to threaten the future of the nation.”20 The proper education of women, therefore, encompassed activities that would benefit the home, such as sewing, needlework, and art, and that which would develop mental and physical discipline as well as social comportment, such as dance and music.

17 Ibid., 113. 18 Quoted in Tamar Garb, “Berthe Morisot and the Feminizing of Impressionism,” in Teri J. Edelstein, ed., Perspectives on Morisot (New York, NY: Hudson Hills Press, 1990), 62. 19 Garb, Sisters, 114. 20 Ibid.

“The Woman at the Piano” as a Cultural Icon

The piano‟s iconographic role as a sign of female propriety and accomplishment, the ultimate goals of a bourgeois education for women, developed as much through popular imagery as it did through high art.21 Fashion plates, advertisements, and sheet music, produced and circulated on a mass scale, played a significant part in enunciating the symbolic language of this instrument. Within many of these images, the expression of feminine culture and refinement is reduced to a culturally-defined template, which mandates a demure, fashionable, and poised young woman seated at the instrument. The French “feminine” press, including publications such as Journal des Femmes, Le Charivari, and La Vie Parisienne, reproduced numerous depictions of the woman at the piano. Achille Devéria‟s sentimental Prélude (Fig. 3),22 which appeared in the first issue of Journal des Femmes in 1832, characterizes the type of imagery directed at the journal‟s female, piano-playing readership. Two fashionably-dressed women occupy an equally stylish domestic interior. The woman at the piano is resplendent in a voluminous dress, ornamented with neatly-tied bows and cascades of ribbon tumbling from the sash around her tightly-cinched waist. She turns the page of the music before her, seemingly unconcerned with the impracticality of the fashionable white gloves she wears. The pianist turns her elaborately coiffed head to meet her companion‟s gaze, who leans on the edge of the instrument. Perhaps a representation of a vocalist and pianist practicing together, this mannered scene is much less about the women‟s musical collaboration than their collective beauty, poise, and fashionable dress. According to Devéria‟s image, gatherings around the piano fostered charming interactions between refined ladies, an ideal to be desired and emulated.

21 For more discussion of the theme in high art, see chapter three of this thesis. 22 Found in Parakilas, 218.

The same basic woman-piano prototype prevails in other forms of popular imagery. An undated sheet music title page shows a modest young woman seated at the instrument in a tastefully-decorated interior, demurely looking at the viewer with her hands posed over the keys

(Fig. 4). Similarly, an 1845 advertisement for music lessons positions a woman at the piano in a modern, well-kept home, next to a harp and surrounded by framed pictures on the wall that attest to the family‟s social status and distinguished taste (Fig. 5).23 As Eyerman deduced from this imagery,

The advertisement‟s logic assumes that the audience … will recognize the space as “home” and the “woman at the piano” as an attainable projection of self. The advertisement employs the “woman at the piano” image to sell piano lessons, but also to sell the consumer a form of cultural capital.24

Both sheet music and piano-related advertisements were marketed predominantly toward bourgeois women, who constituted the primary consumers of such products.25 Through these images, women were indoctrinated with the idea that music and piano played integral roles in the development of a sophisticated and feminine self.

Popular art was thus instrumental in codifying and disseminating contemporary French values embedded in the ubiquitous woman-piano icon. Mass-produced representations of this type enunciated women‟s proper appearance, activities, and above all, her passivity. It is with this type of imagery that Morisot certainly would have been acquainted. Several scholars have argued for the influence of nineteenth-century fashion plates on her work, both in terms of subject matter and composition.26 According to historian Anne Schirrmeister,

23 Found in Eyerman, 192. 24 Eyerman, 39. 25 For more discussion of men and the piano, see chapter two of this thesis. 26 According to Anne Schirrmeister, Morisot certainly would have read La Dernière Mode, a fashion magazine published for a short time by her good friend, symbolist poet and fashion connoisseur, Stéphane Mallarmé. See Higonnet, 110-111, and Anne Schirrmeister, “La Denière Mode: Berthe Morisot and Costume,” Perspectives on Morisot, 105.

…[T]he fashion plate provided Morisot and other women of her period with a world view of the positive values of modern life. It was an important inspiration for Morisot‟s creation of an alternative, vie-moderne subject, as well as a source for her specific poses, for the character and arrangement of her interiors, and for her overall composition and format.27

Morisot‟s oeuvre is undeniably dominated by portraits of women engaged in activities central to the haute bourgeoisie.28 She drew her subject matter from her own experiences within this sphere, and as Higonnet avers, “Morisot worked with values and meanings and practices she did not determine and could not control.”29 Clearly, the woman at the piano would have been a familiar concept to a woman who had been raised with upper-middle-class values, yet she did not slavishly copy the woman-piano archetype as it had developed within visual culture. Instead, her ruminations on the theme bespeak a desire to instill within her female pianists an assertive self- awareness rarely, if ever, found in previous depictions.

Le Piano: Morisot’s Redefinition of the “Woman at the Piano”

The subject of Morisot‟s Le Piano readily falls into the tradition of piano scenes.

However, the artist‟s compositional choices separate this painting from the body of woman- piano representations that preceded it, for this image portrays much more than a superficial air of cultural refinement. It celebrates the intellectual and musical achievements of the sitters:

Morisot‟s daughter, Julie, and niece, Jeannie Gobillard.30 This sympathetic representation undoubtedly resulted in part from the artist‟s intimate relationships with these girls as their mother and aunt, respectively, but this scene is more than a double portrait. Le Piano is a conscious reworking of the symbolic framework inherent in its visual precedents to suit the

27 Schirrmeister, 105. 28 Higonnet notes that of the artist‟s 858 catalogued works, over 500 are images of women. Nearly all the rest are still-lifes or landscapes. Images of Women, 22. 29 Ibid., 33. 30 Jeannie was the daughter of Morisot‟s eldest sister, Yves Gobillard (1838-1893).

15 nature of this particular scene. In doing so, Morisot asserted her view on the fulfilling purpose of the piano and music in women‟s lives and the competence of the female mind.

Painted in earthy brown and blue hues and executed with Morisot‟s characteristic fleeting brushstrokes, Le Piano depicts the figures of the two girls seated at the piano. Jeannie, the older of the two children, sits upright at the instrument in perfect profile. Her hands positioned over the keyboard, she reads the music before her with intense concentration as she plays, unaware of the strand of hair that has fallen across her forehead and cheek in her activity. Seated closely to her right is the figure of Julie, who is leaning directly on the keys of the piano. The girls often made music as an ensemble and even took lessons together, and Jeannie would grow up to become an accomplished pianist.31 Julie also knew how to play the piano, although her musical gifts were best expressed on the violin, which she played quite well. In Le Piano, Jeannie is the active musician while Julie participates by listening attentively to her cousin‟s playing.

Morisot‟s vigorous brushwork enlivens the wall behind the girls‟ figures, and surrounds each girl with a painterly aura. Within this friendly scene of music-making, the most arresting point of the canvas is Julie‟s gaze. Rather than diverting her glance away from the picture plane or to her companion, Julie looks unabashedly at the viewer. Her bold, contemplative gaze is the focus of the composition and central to the reading of this canvas as a departure from the archetypal woman-piano construction.

Le Piano represents an important work in Morisot‟s oeuvre, if only for the amount of time she spent preparing for the final version. Her finished double portrait of Julie and Jeannie is the culmination of no fewer than eight preparatory drawings, one pastel, and three oil sketches of

31 Julie Manet, Growing Up with the Impressionists: The Diary of Julie Manet, trans. and ed. by Rosalind de Boland Roberts and Jane Roberts (London: Sotheby‟s Publications, 1987), 22.

16 the composition made over the course of a year.32 Although the essential subject remained the same throughout its various incarnations, its evolution reveals much about the final work. The charcoal drawing Two Girls at the Piano (n.d.) (Fig. 6) delineates the two girls seated closely together at the piano, although the instrument is not shown. Both Julie and Jeannie are turned toward their unseen sheet music, completely absorbed in their activity.33 Morisot considerably altered this composition in other preparatory works by turning Julie to face the viewer, as she is in the final canvas.34 In each of these works, Julie is entirely consumed by the act of listening to her cousin play, underscoring her intellectual engagement with the music, although the directness of her gaze varies with each version. One fragmentary oil sketch, Julie Écoutant (1888) (Fig. 7), depicts Julie leaning on the keys of the piano. Her cousin‟s presence is indicated by her fingers on the keys, although her full figure is not included in the composition.35 A comparison of this preliminary study with Morisot‟s final canvas reveals an important compositional change.

Although Julie‟s casual posture remains the same in Le Piano and Julie Écoutant, in the earlier sketch her eyes do not look out at the viewer but instead at the unseen figure of her cousin. Her focus remains fixed within the scene, seemingly unaware of being the object of attention for an outside viewer. This lack of communication with the space beyond Julie‟s immediate environs invites the outside viewer to look without being seen, rendering her figure a passive object of the gaze. It seems that this configuration did not portray what Morisot had intended, for in another

32 Alain Clairet, Berthe Morisot, 1841-1895: Catalogue Raisonné de l’Oeuvre Peint (Paris, CÉRA-nrs, 1997), 229. 33 Regina Schoolman noted that during the period this sketch was executed, “Berthe Morisot was increasingly associated with [Pierre-Auguste] Renoir [1841-1919].… [He] had also done Two Girls at the Piano and the studies show decided points of kinship.” However, the final version of Le Piano predates Renoir‟s series of girls at the piano, which was painted in 1892. His first double piano portrait is The Piano Lesson (1889). Even if Morisot‟s concept for Le Piano was inspired by her association with Renoir, she significantly departed from his compositions by choosing to orient Julie toward the viewer. See Elizabeth Mongan, et al., Berthe Morisot: Drawings/Pastels/Watercolors/Paintings (New York, NY: Tudor Pub. Co., 1960), 42. 34 Several other preliminary sketches exist that closely resemble the final canvas. As such, I omit them from the discussion to avoid redundancy. 35 Morisot included both Julie and Jeannie in the original canvas, but it was left unfinished by the artist and subsequently trimmed by Madame Rouart. Mongan, et al., [167].

17 sketch for the final work, she concentrated on the figure of her daughter (Fig. 8). However, this time Julie is sitting upright, looking assertively at the viewer. Le Piano represents an amalgamation of the most compelling features of each of these two compositions: Julie‟s casual, almost rebellious posture in Julie Écoutant (Fig. 7), and her direct, unyielding gaze in the second study (Fig. 8).

By choosing to depict Julie at the piano in this unusual way, Morisot emphasized her individual nature and her self-awareness. Julie‟s personality is not obscured by a veil of proper feminine conduct, but rather highlighted as focal point of the work. Her penetrating stare and relaxed stance tell a story that diverges from the prevailing woman at the piano mythos. In the final canvas, Morisot chose to include iconographic elements, both traditionally feminine and non-feminine symbols, which denote the contradictory nature of this piano scene in comparison to the archetypal tableau of heightened femininity. Hanging on the wall are two fans, barely visible among the flurry of brushstrokes. The fan, although here functioning in a purely decorative fashion, was deeply associated with feminine culture in France. It was an essential accessory to a fashionable ensemble, recalling the elegance and gallantry of the ancient régime.

In her book on nineteenth-century female fashion, historian Susan Hiner argues that “the fan was linked both metonymically to the female body and metaphorically to cultural fantasies of womanhood.”36 Its association with women‟s bodies was expressed through the terminology of its parts, consisting of a pied (foot), a tête (head), and a gorge (bosom). When used, the fan functions as a seductive device, able to reveal or conceal with the flick of a woman‟s wrist.

Although the fans in Morisot‟s canvas are also indicative of the object‟s vogue in the era of japonisme, certainly there is also some connection to feminine culture. A number of her other

36 Susan Hiner, Accessories to Modernity: Fashion and the Feminine in Nineteenth-Century France (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 148.

18 portraits of women prominently include the hand fan so often that it is regarded as a leitmotif within her oeuvre and has been discussed by several Morisot scholars.37 A preliminary pastel sketch of Le Piano depicts the girls at the piano, Julie regarding the viewer with a dreamy expression. All aspects of the final composition are present except the decorative fans (Fig. 9).

Contained within Morisot‟s ultimate canvas, then, are purposeful references to the established construction of femininity.

There is a deliberate tension within Le Piano between the typical accoutrements of femininity—the piano, the fans, the dresses both girls wear, the bow in Jeannie‟s hair—and the elements that were not typically associated with women. This combination of feminine and non- feminine components within this canvas relates it to the culture of womanhood, yet surpasses femininity‟s traditional definition within French society. Julie‟s assertive gaze was a key method of communicating her self-awareness and individuality, but Morisot also endeavored to distinguish her in other ways. Rather than representing the embodiment of a model little girl,

Julie is instead depicted in a somewhat androgynous fashion. Although she wears a dress, her hair is cut short, a style that would have been atypical for women and girls in the nineteenth century. A comparison with another portrait of Julie, Le Mandoline (1889) (Fig. 10), painted a year later than Le Piano, confirms that her hair was styled relatively short at the time; here, it just brushes the top of her back, and is unrestrained by pins, barrettes, or bows. This in itself can be considered counter to traditional representations of femininity, and further suggests that Julie is represented as an individual rather than a conventional young woman.

Strikingly, Morisot endeavored to visually denote her daughter‟s intelligence. This is most clearly conveyed through the inclusion of an illuminated lamp just above Julie‟s head. Art historian Robert Hopson wrote on the importance of Morisot‟s use of this iconographic device,

37 See Higonnet, Images of Women, and Schirrmeister, “La Denière Mode: Berthe Morisot and Costume.”

19 calling it a “multivalent symbol—an emblem of the productive faculty of Julie‟s imagination as well as a clear declaration of the artist‟s principle that favored an independent, conceptual aesthetic.”38 It is through this device, visually linked with Julie‟s head by the handle of the fan, that Morisot symbolized her daughter‟s intellectual nature as she listens attentively to her

Jeannie‟s playing. Contrary to the negative nineteenth-century opinion of women‟s cognitive faculties, Julie is here depicted as a thoughtful young woman, capable of abstract thought.39

The Implications of Girls at the Piano

Morisot‟s departure from the standard woman-piano configuration is thus made apparent through her depiction of Julie as a free-willed, intellectual being rather than a passive participant in a near-mandatory cultural tradition. However, the fact that Julie and Jeannie are not grown women in this painting bears significance and deserves discussion, for the representation of children at the piano contains subtle differences in meaning. Furthermore, Morisot‟s depiction of her own daughter in this setting is not simply a reinterpretation of a popular compositional formula, it is also a meaningful portrait conceived from her perspective as a mother.

The latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed a greater cultural interest in children, stimulated by a number of concomitant ideas and societal developments. According to Hopson, the most influential of these factors were

…the great acceptance and wider dissemination of more natural approaches in the care of children; both the Romantic cults of the individual and of the child; the acceleration of a culture structured in part around the principle of separating public from private life and the nuclear family; general reforms in public education for children in France; the reduction of diseases and infant mortality

38 Hopson, 239. 39 Hopson also wrote of Morisot‟s sympathetic portrayal of Julie as an intelligent girl in this painting. However, his analysis of this work, in conjunction with his study of the artist‟s other musical portraits, was primarily centered on establishing Morisot as an avant-garde artist, influenced by her connections with symbolist writers. He does not interpret Le Piano in terms of its departure from the dominant woman at the piano motif.

through advances in medicine; and developing from several areas of study, the emergence of a scientifically-based psychology.40

Hopson notes that these developments were evident in the realm of the visual arts and manifested themselves in artists‟ “close consideration of the ways and means of children‟s living and thinking.”41 Certainly, this attention to the inner workings of the child is present in Morisot‟s concentration on Julie‟s enigmatic stare. Portraits of children were also embedded with a number of deep-seated associations resulting from the nature of their youthful circumstance, their state as an impressionable tabula rasa and their future role in society. As Perrot argues,

“The child in the nineteenth century was more than ever the center of the family, which invested in it not only emotionally but also economically, educationally, and existentially. As heir, the child represented the family‟s future, its projected image of itself, its dream, and its way of doing battle with time and death.”42 Even further, “[T]he child was not an exclusive possession of the family but the future of the nation and the race, tomorrow‟s producer and progenitor, citizen and soldier.”43 Once understood in this light, the representation of children is shaded by the understanding that they represent the future of the family as well as the fate of the country.

Within the genre of piano scenes, the depiction of young girls at the piano heralded their expected growth into proper women, who would be assets to both a family‟s reputation and the continuation of the nation. Paintings such as La Leçon de Piano (1780s) (Fig. 11), by

Marguerite Gerard, clearly demonstrate the piano‟s role in the development of a young child‟s character as a reflection of her mother, who she will eventually succeed. Set within a darkened interior, a woman in lavish dress oversees her daughter‟s musical progress while the young girl looks up toward her mother. Their languid gestures mirror each another, visually equating the

40 Hopson, 32. 41 Ibid., 33. 42 Perrot, 196. 43 Ibid.

21 mother with her progeny and underscoring their genetic as well as behavioral bonds. The embedded moral here speaks to the woman‟s grace and poise, and the young girl‟s status as a cultural neophyte being molded under her mother‟s direction. By extension, this painting of a sentimental pedagogic moment underscores the family‟s virtue and the promise of its continuance as the young girl matures to adulthood.

In terms of serving as a family portrait, Le Piano is similar in its aim to La Leçon de

Piano. Although Morisot has not included herself in the composition, her presence is implied by

Julie‟s gaze toward her mother in the act of painting. An interesting relationship emerges between mother and daughter in which the latter becomes a reflection of the former. From a

Freudian perspective, parental love “is nothing but the parents‟ narcissism born again … [and] transformed into object-love.”44 Although this clinical description is not a comprehensive summation of parental love, its seed of truth lies in the fact that children are, to an extent, versions of their parents in miniature. Parents often hope to instill in their progeny the fundamental attitudes and beliefs by which they themselves are defined. This desire seems to be at work in Le Piano. Morisot, in the non-traditional position as female artist, has painted Julie as an echo of herself—independent, unconventional, and intelligent. Julie and her cousin partake in music-making as active melodic producers for their own enjoyment, much in the way that

Morisot practiced the art of painting far beyond the extent expected of bourgeois women.

Seated at the household piano, a space inundated with pressures of cultural conformity,

Julie and her cousin thus arise above the notion of piano playing as a lighthearted pastime.

Morisot drew upon the familiar woman-piano theme perpetuated in French society for her subject but consciously redefined it. Her close familial bonds with the sitters colored her

44 Sigmund Freud, quoted in Mary Jacobus, First Things: The Maternal Imaginary in Literature, Art, and Psychoanalysis (New York, NY: Routledge, 1995), 274-5.

22 compositional choices, prompting Morisot to emphasize these girls‟ embrace of music for reasons more profound than simply clothing themselves in a veneer of culture. In doing so, she dignified the art of learning to play the piano as something more than a superficial bourgeois ritual, more than a mere means of developing the ideal comportment for a woman‟s expected role in marriage and motherhood. For Julie and Jeannie, playing the instrument served as a step on the path to self-fulfillment.

CHAPTER TWO

Constructions of Pianism and Morisot’s Lucie Léon au Piano, 1892

If women personified “the graces, beauty, and love” and were “sublime in their maternity,” men, “ennobled in nature through their initiative,” were required to embody the opposing principles of “force, resolution, and work.”45

The art of piano playing, as I discussed in the first chapter of this thesis, was an activity considered eminently suitable for the bourgeois woman. The instrument‟s role in the cultivation of proper femininity was firmly established in nineteenth-century France, and the close connection between piano playing and femininity is observable within French visual culture where the woman at the piano theme developed into a distinct genre regulated by certain symbolic conventions. The iconography of female piano portraiture, which designates passivity and amateurism as the primary attributes of the female pianist, was informed not only by the traditional education of bourgeois girls, but also the space where this activity takes place. This is the domestic space, the proper domain of bourgeois women. Within this private realm, the woman at the piano is more of an ornament than a melodic producer, and there is little need to visually depict her as an active musician. The desired effect of female piano playing, the development of a cultivated woman who makes a suitable wife and mother, calls for appropriate representational means—a docile, attractive female at the piano, hands poised but not contorted by actual performance.

The last piano portrait in Morisot‟s oeuvre, Lucie Léon au Piano (1892) (Fig. 12), like Le

Piano, exists as a departure from the standard piano portrait and, in some ways, seems to subvert

45 Quoted portions from Ernest LeGouvé, La Femme en France au XIXe Siècle (Paris: Librarie de la Bibliothèque Democratique, 1873), 178, in Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 156.

24 the established notion of the female pianist.46 The young girl‟s intense countenance strikes the viewer immediately, leaving no trace of sweetness and affectation typical of female piano portraiture. Whether this painting was done on commission is unknown, as is Morisot‟s precise relationship with Léon. Biographical information on the young girl is scarce, but she certainly was not a member of the artist‟s immediate family. Rather, Léon was training to be a concert pianist.47 That this girl was receiving a musical education in the interest of pursuing a career in the field differentiates this painting from the ideal of amateurism embedded in prototypical woman-piano images. However, even without knowing the background of the sitter, it is clear that Morisot has imbued this young pianist with a sense of presence with the act of making music.

While the assertive nature of Morisot‟s Lucie Léon au Piano departs from many of the aforementioned conventions of female piano portraiture, it borrows some traditions from images of men playing the piano. Although the instrument was primarily identified with women, there exists in French visual culture a number of images of men at the piano. The majority of these depict professional musicians and composers; less common are representations of men at the piano in the home. While circumstances differ greatly between the professional male musician and the male amateur, certain iconographic tendencies persist between the two that are noticeably absent from the traditional portrait of the female pianist. A study of male and female piano portraits reveals a dichotomous iconographic language between them. The pictorial conventions of the female pianist relegated her musical domain to the home, her skill level to

46 Unlike Le Piano, which was not exhibited until 1929, Lucie Léon au Piano was exhibited in 1893 during the artist‟s lifetime at the Association pour l‟Art in Anvers. Although Le Piano may have been more of a personal work for Morisot than Lucie Léon au Piano, particularly because it depicts her own daughter and niece, the artist still explored similarly unusual iconography in her later piano painting. See Clairet, 229, 271. 47 There is scant information regarding Léon‟s life, and whether she actually became a professional pianist is unknown. Ibid., 271.

25 that of an amateur, and most importantly, the act of her music-making as subordinate to her physical appearance, which should be suitably feminine and charming. Images of the male pianist, whether professional or amateur, are serious, imbued with power, and emphasize the cerebral aspects of music making. Contrary to women, men appear at the instrument as active musicians, and the piano serves as a means by which a man demonstrates his individuality and intellectual capacity. Lucie Léon au Piano, with its startling gaze of the sitter and her engaged presence at the piano, exists as an unusual mélange of iconographic attributes characteristic of female and male pianists, pitting the traditional domestic environs of the former against the self- awareness and dynamic nature of the latter.

PROFESSIONAL PIANISTS IN VISUAL CULTURE

The disparity between representations of male and female amateurism at the piano is amplified by a consideration of its opposite: professional pianism, epitomized by the figure of the virtuoso. Within this category developed a verbal and pictorial language for describing the pianist who existed to dazzle audiences with a herculean technique and insightful musical interpretations. The virtuoso was a genius in the Romantic sense—brilliant, tempestuous, unique. The language of virtuosity, however, could be applied comfortably only to men.

Although female piano virtuosos existed, critical reviews diminished the quality of their performance and often resorted to an analysis of their physical appearance and the feminine nature of their playing.48 And although images of male virtuosos abounded, artists rarely depicted women in this capacity.49 The standard woman at the piano motif, as Charlotte

Eyerman has noted, “always insists on amateur, anonymous status,” imbued with “a generic

48 For a detailed discussion of the contemporary critical reception of female pianists in France, see Katherine Ellis, “Female Pianists and Their Male Critics in Nineteenth-Century Paris,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 50, No. 2/3 (Summer-Autumn 1997): 353-385. 49 Eyerman reiterates this notion in her writing, noting that she never came across an image of a professional female pianist in her extensive survey of journals in the feminine press. See Eyerman, 50.

26 identity that typically excludes musical talent and public performance.”50 The iconographic vocabulary of the male pianist, brought to its fullest expression in images of the professional pianist, centered on qualities, both physical and mental, that differentiated men from women according to nineteenth-century thought. To a further degree, in the realm of the male virtuoso, the piano became a vehicle for the expression of self. A pianist‟s mannerisms and interpretive style combined to form an individualistic musical persona, highlighting the antithetical equalizing role the instrument played in the lives of bourgeois women.

Paris in the 1830s became the center of the rise of the great piano virtuoso, epitomized by the prolific Hungarian composer-pianist Franz Liszt (1811-1886).51 During his most active period of public concertizing between the years of 1839 and 1847, he played over one thousand recitals.52 These concerts became sites of spectacle, where the experience of listening became intricately bound with the visual nature of his performance. Liszt‟s unrestrained, forceful playing broke piano strings and destroyed hammers, prompting critics like Austrian journalist

Moritz Gottlib Saphir (1795-1858) to describe Liszt‟s frenzied playing in frankly sexualized terms:

Liszt … is an amiable fiend who treats his mistress—the piano—now tenderly, now tyrannically, devours her with kisses, lacerates her with lustful bites, embraces her, caresses her, sulks with her, scolds her, rebukes her, grabs her by the hair, clasps her then all the more delicately, more affectionately, more passionately, more flamingly, more meltingly.… After the concert Liszt stands there like a victor on a battlefield.… Daunted pianos lie around him; torn strings wave like flags of truce; frightened instruments flee into distant corners; the listeners look at each other as after a cataclysm of nature that has just passed by.… And he stands there leaning melancholically on his chair, smiling strangely,

50 Ibid. 51 As the Polish pianist-composer, Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849), once quipped, “I really don‟t know where any place contains more pianists than Paris, or whether you can find anywhere more asses and virtuosos.” As quoted in Paul Metzer, Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skills, and Self-Promotion in Paris During the Age of Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, Ltd., 1998), 129. 52 Richard Leppert, “Cultural Contradiction, Idolatry, and the Piano Virtuoso: Franz Liszt,” in Parakilas, 273.

like an exclamation point after the outbreak of general admiration. Thus is Franz Liszt.53

The virtuoso Liszt embodied the essence of maleness at the piano, which was everything the amateur female pianist was not supposed to be: powerful, virile, dominating. A caricature from

1873 depicts the pianist in a series of eight scenes that illustrate the dynamism of his playing

(Fig. 13). The “Sun King of the Piano”—who once famously declared, “The concert is— myself”54—underwent physical and mental transfigurations as he progressed through the piece, experiencing the music and communicating it in a very physical way. The production of music became bound with the expression of self. Implicit in this reverence for the musical cogitations of a particular man was the Romantic notion of the genius, embodied by the virtuoso whose gift of emotional depth and expressive capabilities had the ability to enchant audiences. Here lies a crucial distinction between the female amateur and the virtuoso, echoed in the figure of the amateur male pianist: in the hands of the latter, the piano becomes a site of spectacle and self- proclamation rather than the locus of decorum and social grace.

The musical genius, endowed with dazzling technical abilities and a gift for profound musical interpretation, was necessarily a masculine figure in nineteenth-century Paris. The practice of public performance, the physicality of virtuosic playing, and the interpretive difficulty of Romantic music were considered to be parts of the masculine domain.55 Although the names of several nineteenth-century female virtuosos are known today, the French public demonstrated some ambivalence toward female concert pianists.56 The perceived realities of feminine nature seemed incompatible with the public life of a virtuoso, and a double standard developed to accommodate female pianists in this decidedly male realm. The supposed disparities between

53 Moritz Gottlib Saphir, quoted in Leppert, 280. 54 Franz Liszt to Princess Christina Belgiojoso, Italy, 1839, quoted in Leppert, 254. 55 See Ellis. 56 Ibid.

28 the physical, technical, and interpretive capabilities of male and female pianists resulted in a prescribed manner in which each gender should play. Women were expected to develop a repertoire of Baroque and Classical music, and avoid the intensity and interpretive difficulties of

Beethoven‟s music or the demanding finger work of Liszt‟s compositions.57 In keeping with the

“gentle nature” of her sex, the female concert pianist was urged to be sweet and charming, and play with a delicate tone. As music historian Katherine Ellis has noted, critical reviews of women‟s performances were often concerned as much, if not more, with their physical appearance as their playing. There is “an attention to the physicality of women‟s playing that is almost entirely absent in reviews of male performers, except for comments related to power.”58

According to an 1852 review of playing by the pianist Wilhelmine Szarvárdy (1834-1907), she had “a tendency to the exaggeration of power, which too often precludes grace and simplicity, that poetry of women.”59 Even more illustrative is a review of the performance of pianist Louise

Mattmann (1826-1861):

What pleases me in Mme Mattmann‟s playing is that she does not seek to draw more sound from the instrument than her physical capabilities allow; her playing could be fuller, but it is sweet, even, limpid, and feminine: to play like a woman is a grace—it is an attraction that too many women pianists now disdain. I congratulate Mme Mattmann for having remained of her own sex…60

Perhaps the primary reason for the ambivalence toward female virtuosos was the morally dubious nature of a woman putting herself on display in the public sphere. A woman who embarked on a public career was not fully devoted to her domestic duties, which subverted entrenched gender roles that identified a woman‟s primary purposes as that of wife and mother.

The female virtuoso also risked de-feminizing herself through public display. According to art

57 Ibid., 364. 58 Ibid., 367. 59 La France musicale 7, no. 7 (18 February 1844): 50, quoted in Ellis, 368. 60 La France musicale 24, no. 9 (26 February 1860): 102, quoted in Ellis, 369.

29 historian Griselda Pollock, “It has been argued that to maintain one‟s respectability, closely identified with femininity, meant not exposing oneself in public. The public space was officially the realm of and for men; for women to enter it entailed unforeseen risks.”61 Clearly, a female piano virtuoso would transgress these boundaries with any sort of public concertizing. In her article detailing the reception of female virtuosos in nineteenth-century France, Ellis recounts

Jean-Jacques Rousseau‟s gendering of behavior in his Lettre à M. d’Alembert (1758), in which proper femininity was described as the “pitting of female modesty and domesticity (the true, natural woman) against female display (the aberrant woman), since women in the latter category bordered on hermaphroditism in their adoption of masculine behavior.”62

Ellis also quotes a curious anecdote that appeared in the journal La France musicale in

1848. The author, known only as C.V., recounted the story of a woman who eschewed a traditional life of domesticity to become a concert pianist. The story ends with the woman‟s marriage after her professional aspirations met with failure: “Eugénie Bernard is now Mme

Renaud. She is still a charming woman. She has not ceased to cultivate music, but does so only as a useful distraction. She is the first to laugh at what she jokingly calls her musical skirmish

[original emphasis].”63 The moral of this cautionary tale clearly advises women against professional musical aspirations, belittling the role that public performance should play in their lives. This negativity toward serious female musicianship is doubly reflected both in the lack of visual representations of female virtuosos and the perpetuation of the conventional woman-piano theme. The qualities championed in male virtuosos in both visual culture and critical reviews construct masculine pianism as the display of skill and the ability for profound self-expression.

61 Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art (New York, NY: Routledge, 1988), 97. 62 Ellis, 362. 63 Ibid., 354.

The iconographic vocabulary of the male pianist, therefore, was centered on qualities, both physical and mental, that differentiated men from women according to nineteenth-century thought.

MALE AMATEURISM AT THE PIANO

The majority of images of men at the piano depict professional performers or composers, but occasionally the amateur male pianist appears in visual culture and fine art. Although the term “amateur” by definition connotes proficiency on a different level from the professional, many of the same qualities that define the iconography of the professional male musician were carried over into these images. Perhaps one of the best known works in this category is by an

Impressionist colleague of Morisot, Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894). Critics praised his Young

Man Playing the Piano (1876) (Fig. 14), displayed at the Second Impressionist Exhibition 1876, for its “seriousness.”64 Set within a highly decorative nineteenth-century interior, a man is seated at a polished black grand piano, his eyes fixed on the sheet music before him as he plays.65 A comparison of this painting with Young Woman at the Piano (1876) (Fig. 15) by Pierre-Auguste

Renoir (1841-1919), which appeared in the same exhibition, elucidates the fundamental iconographic differences between male and female pianistic amateurism.66 Here, Renoir, who was a great exponent of the woman at the piano motif, has painted a thoroughly traditional interpretation of the theme with respect to female docility and passivity.67 A woman in a long, flowing dress is seated at a piano, immersed in the printed music before her, her hands calmly posed over the keys. The serpentine line of black ribbon leads the eye down to the ruffled edge of her skirt, which threatens to spill over into the viewer‟s space. Although the basic

64 Eyerman, 143. 65 Ibid. 66 Eyerman, 144. 67 Young Woman at the Piano was Renoir‟s first of at least eleven female piano portraits he produced over the course of his career. See Anne Distel, et al., Renoir (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1985), 208.

31 composition of each work—an individual seen in profile, absorbed in the music, hands over the keys—is fairly similar, there are some significant differences that indicate the divergent purpose of each painting. Most obviously, the female pianist is playing an upright piano, a compact version of the instrument developed specifically for the domestic interior, and the male musician sits before a grand piano, which is associated with professional musicians and serious performance. Less apparent, but of paramount significance, is the posture and implied motion of each musician. Renoir‟s female pianist is depicted in a stance that is quite artificial. She is seated much too close to the piano and leans toward the keyboard with her upper body, which produces a demure posture that, although graceful, is not ideal for actually playing the instrument. Like the female virtuoso, the female amateur pianist is subjected to undue focus on her appearance at the expense of musicianship.

Perhaps the most important iconographic dissimilarity between the male and female amateur pianist in these canvases is the position of their hands. My survey of works depicting non-professional men at the piano revealed that they are commonly shown in the act of making music. When the male pianist‟s hands are visible, they express the tension of playing and real physical motion. Conversely, female pianists are on the whole depicted as posing at the piano, and rarely are their hands positioned in a way that indicates true playing. This convention is plainly evident in the paintings of Caillebotte and Renoir. The docile manner in which the fingers of Renoir‟s pianist are placed over the keys, outstretched but limp, do not express any sort of action. Conversely, the hands of Caillebotte‟s pianist are captured in the act of playing, vigorously rebounding off the keys in an apparently fortissimo moment in the music. A later work by Félix Vallotton, titled Le Piano (1896) (Fig. 16), exhibits this same approach. Although the subject of Vallotton‟s woodcut is not playing as forcefully as Caillebotte‟s pianist, there is a

32 clear focus on his hands and the act of his playing, indicated by the extension of his fingers and his actual depression of the keys. This gendering of hands, for lack of a better term, is elucidated by Higonnet in her attention to hands in nineteenth-century portraits:

In the nineteenth century men expected their hands as well as their faces to convey their character. Victor Fournel, flaneur and pundit, elaborated: “It‟s rare that a bourgeois has himself painted without hands, or else it‟s in spite of himself. A portrait without hands doesn‟t exist for the bourgeois: it‟s something incomplete, like an amputee. The pose and expression of the hands preoccupy him to the highest degree.” Women‟s hands mattered much less. Gloved and soft, gently poised but never pointing, appendages to fans, bouquets, or needlework, feminine hands conveyed character only by their restraint [my emphasis].68

Higonnet‟s observation reaches the heart of the iconographic dissimilarity between visual representations of the hands of male and female pianist. The difference lies in the very purpose for playing for each gender, as I have discussed above and reiterate here: whereas for women playing the piano became way of expressing femininity and social refinement, for a man the activity was a means of self-expression.

The male pianists by Caillebotte and Vallotton contain another key aspect that differentiates them from the female pianist. They are engaged in the act of making music as a leisure activity, rather than as a socially prescribed action as it often was for women, and they are portrayed as learned and insightful musicians. In Young Man Playing the Piano, the subject is the artist‟s brother, Martial, who composed music. Although Martial is not depicted with the conventional attributes of pen and manuscript paper that might identify him as a musical creator, he is, as one contemporary reviewer described him, shown as a “student of [Antoine-François]

Marmontel [1816-1898],” a reference to a famous composer and pedagogue at the Paris

Conservatoire whose scores were published in bound books resembling the stack on the edge of

68 Higonnet, 155.

33 the piano.69 This reference shapes the viewer‟s perception of the pianist, who is seen as a serious student of music, one who plays for a genuine love of the piano. The pianist in Vallotton‟s Le

Piano plays without the presence of sheet music, which denotes the idea that he possesses such ability that he does not need written music. The music he plays could be improvised or memorized, but either way there is no physical intermediary that interferes with the sound he produces and his internal creative impulses. The common thread that connects these depictions of male pianists is such: their musical production is equated with an internal impulse that compels them to produce music. This is a stark contrast to the meaning of the female piano portrait, whose presence at the piano represents an external societal pressure to conform to expectations of femininity.

THE ICONOGRAPHIC SIGNIFICANCE OF LUCIE LÉON AU PIANO

The division between representations of men and women at the piano is a clear phenomenon. It is amplified in images of lauded piano virtuosos, in which the subject of admiration is nearly always male. Some of the same ideas that characterize these representations of professional pianists—that they are technically proficient, active musicians who possess an internal need and gift for musical expression—are carried over into representations of amateur men playing the piano. Like virtuosos, these amateur pianists are shown with dynamically posed hands and imbued with a sense of internal awareness and deliberate thought in their musical activity. Traditional woman at the piano images, on the other hand, serve to emphasize the femininity of the subject, both in her physical appearance and her comportment. In this light,

Morisot‟s portrait of the young Léon seems at odds with traditional iconography. The painting, which Morisot‟s daughter, Julie, characterized as “all blue like the „Blue Boy‟ by

69 Anne Distel, et al., Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Musée d‟Orsay/Chicago, IL: Art Institute of Chicago/New York, NY: Abbeville Press, 1995), 193.

Gainsborough,” depicts a girl in blue frock, enveloped in her blue surroundings, at an upright piano.70 Like images of virtuosos and some amateur male pianists, Léon is depicted at the piano without sheet music. Her hands are positioned over the keys and she regards the viewer with an arresting look. Nothing about the dour expression on her face resembles the delicate and poised sentiment of traditional woman-piano portraits, and it is as if the girl resents the intrusion of the viewer in her practice time.71 Here, Léon seems to have much in common with the standard iconography of male piano portraits.

Perhaps the strongest parallel between Morisot‟s portrait and male piano portrayals is her concentration on the young girl‟s hands. The whiteness of Léon‟s bare arms and hands draw the viewer‟s eye immediately, and the clarity and anatomical correctness with which Morisot has rendered the pianist‟s hands indicates their importance in her activity. Recalling Higonnet‟s statement of the perceived ability of the hands to indicate character of a subject, conventional female piano portraiture mandated that the female pianist‟s hands be delicate and restrained, and thus she is rarely shown in the act of playing. Here, although Léon is not actively depressing the keys, the tensed posture of her hands indicates her preparedness to do so. Her fingers are curved and her musculature taut, converse to the more typical practice of depicting a woman gently resting her smooth, relaxed hands on the keyboard. This subtle departure from convention is of monumental importance: Léon‟s preparedness to play acts as a declaration of her role as a practicing pianist. Although there are markers of traditional aspects of femininity in this portrait, including the roses on the piano, the floral wallpaper, Léon‟s dress, and the neatly-tied bow in

70 Manet, Growing Up with the Impressionists, 95. 71 Part of Lucie‟s expression, it must be noted, may be because, in Julie Manet‟s words, “she was hot” and “would have preferred to play croquet rather than to pose at the piano…” She was, according to Julie, an “unbearable” model. Ibid.

35 her hair, this emphasis on Léon as a musician allies her presence at the piano with the intellectual and expressive concerns of male piano portraiture.

There are two catalogued preparatory oil sketches for Lucie Léon au Piano which underscore Morisot‟s conspicuous choice to depict the young pianist in this particular manner.72

One of these sketches again shows Léon sitting at the piano, looking straight at the viewer (Fig.

17). In a significant compositional departure from the final painting, Léon listlessly rests her right hand on the piano, her fingers in danger of slipping off the keys entirely, while her left hand lies in her lap. The overall effect of this somewhat slouching version of Léon is one of boredom and lethargy, visibly weighted down as she relaxes her posture, far from the greater sense of awareness inherent in the final canvas. A second sketch revised the timbre of the first, depicting a more wide-eyed and alert girl who sits more erectly at the piano and extends both hands toward the keyboard as she would in the finished work (Fig. 18). The progression from sketch to final canvas signifies that Morisot wished to avoid the limp and apathetic piano girl in favor of one more engaged with the instrument.

The setting of Morisot‟s portrait also contributes to the reading of this young girl as a practicing musician. Like both Renoir and Caillebotte, Morisot has placed her pianist in a domestic interior enlivened by patterned floral wallpaper. Léon is surrounded by vigorous strokes of blue paint, and a clear division between foreground and background seems to be suppressed in favor of the expression of the material nature of the painting.73 The repetitive pattern of the wallpaper, as well as Morisot‟s visible brushstrokes, seems to visually approximate the aural sensations of rhythm and melody. Richard Hopson has argued in his dissertation that

72 Morisot also made two preparatory drawings for Lucie Léon au Piano, one depicting Léon with both hands at the piano, and the other showing her with only one hand posed on the keyboard. They are compositionally similar to the oil sketches discussed above, and as such I have omitted them from the present discussion. 73 I will explore the significance of this compression of space and Morisot‟s emphasis on the medium in the third chapter of this thesis.

Morisot‟s musically-themed paintings drew upon avant-garde Symbolist and musical theories, placing her “among a group of late-century French artists who wished to create paintings that would parallel the experience of music.”74 For Hopson, Morisot‟s “distortion of physical matter” denotes “a space that has been transformed through musical performance … [communicating] her belief in select aspects of esoteric philosophy that maintained the power of sound over matter.”75 Whether Morisot evoked the visual nature of musical sound to declare her allegiance to certain “esoteric philosophies” is debatable, but the synaesthetic effect of Morisot‟s dynamic brushwork in Lucie Léon au Piano, as well as Le Piano, visually communicates the production of music, and by extension indicates the sitter‟s role as a performing musician.

Lucie Léon au Piano, therefore, continues the iconographic departure from conventional female piano portraits that Morisot had explored in Le Piano. By incorporating into the former a sense of musical engagement far more common to male piano portraiture, the artist has deemphasized any preoccupation with Léon‟s sweetness and femininity and instead asserted the primacy of her musicianship. The domestic setting in which she practices shimmers with the suggestion of her performance, which has been only momentarily halted to acknowledge our outside presence.

74 Hopson, 226. 75 Ibid., 233.

CHAPTER THREE

Morisot’s Piano Girls in the Age of Impressionism

In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.76

In the previous two chapters of this thesis, I explored the manner in which Morisot‟s Le

Piano and Lucie Léon au Piano departed from the standard of female piano portraiture as it had come to be defined in nineteenth-century French culture. Her pictorial development of these girls beyond a mere portrayal of good breeding and amateur, sometimes disinterested musicianship marks a significant point in the history of piano portraiture. What remains to be discussed is Morisot‟s interpretation of the female pianist in the context of Impressionism and how her work compares with that of her colleagues. I will argue that while the Impressionists treated the woman at the piano theme in a stylistically avant-garde manner in keeping with their aesthetic principles, the essence of these works remained rooted in the same conventions and attitudes that had defined the genre throughout the century. Morisot is unique in her original and empowering reinterpretations of a popular theme.

I will further delve into the significance of looking and the beholder with regard to

Morisot‟s paintings. As I touched on in previous chapters, one of the most striking features of these canvases is the manner in which the subjects confidently look out at the viewer. This compositional detail sparks a number of feminist questions concerning looking and the gaze, and has been noted previously as an atypical characteristic of the woman at the piano genre. I will

76 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), quoted in Charles Harrison, Painting the Difference: Sex and Spectator in Modern Art (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 3.

38 argue that in Le Piano and Lucie Léon au Piano, Morisot has reversed the conventional dichotomy of viewership, transforming the passive female pianist performing her femininity for the pleasure of a presumably male gaze into a self-conscious, assertive figure that challenges the dominance of the spectator and, instead, creates a more symmetrical relationship between subject and viewer.

THE APPEAL OF WOMEN AT THE PIANO IN THE IMPRESSIONIST CIRCLE

The woman-piano theme underwent a veritable renaissance in the works of Impressionist painters, inspired by the mid-nineteenth-century revolt against the academically-ordained, lofty subjects of “high” art. One of the central tenets of the Impressionist style, an idea that had its roots in Realism and the writings of Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), was that the painter‟s subject come from modern life. In his pivotal essay “The Painter of Modern Life” (1859),

Baudelaire redefined the task of the modern artist. Rather than rely on an idealized notion of history and the classical refinement of form championed by the French academy, Baudelaire advised artists to seek out and translate the “particular” beauty of the world around them, to soak up the sense of modernity which revealed itself in “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent.…”77 Those artists who sympathized with Baudelaire‟s ideas inaugurated a new kind of art that found worthy subjects in unassuming places.

Within the era of shifting opinion regarding the proper subject of art, the woman at the piano found a number of proponents. In his 1868 lecture at the École des Beaux-Arts, the academic theorist Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893) urged students to look to seventeenth-century

Dutch painters in order to absorb their unsurpassed ability to depict their “sympathy” for people

77 Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in Art and Theory, 1815-1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. by Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 497.

39 and life, and singled out the woman at the piano as a particularly suitable subject. Charlotte

Eyerman wrote:

In his view, contemporary French genre painters expressed too much „distance‟ in their work, such as sentimental and exoticized genre painting of the French provinces and foreign sites. Instead, Taine urged contemporary painters to concentrate on scenes closer to their own lives and specifically promoted “la demoiselle au piano.”78

Almost a decade later, the French art critic Edmond Duranty echoed Taine‟s words in his detailing of subjects appropriate to “The New Painting” of the 1870s, singling out the figure “at a piano.”79 For proponents of an art rooted in modern life, the woman at the piano, a common scene in nineteenth-century bourgeois culture, constituted an ideal theme.

Within this progressive milieu, the woman-piano motif found its way into the works of the Impressionist circle, and even, as Eyerman has proposed, “seems to have been a sort of artistic rite of passage for this generation.”80 In addition to Morisot, Frédéric Bazille (1841-

1870), Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), Edgar Degas (1834-

1917), Édouard Manet (1832-1883), Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894), and Pierre-Auguste

Renoir (1841-1919) all treated the theme.

One of the earliest Impressionists to take up the woman at the piano was Whistler in his

At the Piano (1858-1859) (Fig. 19), a depiction of his half-sister, Deborah Delano Haden, and her daughter, Annie Harriet Haden, positioned next to a grand piano.81 The young girl, clad in all white, listens attentively as her mother, a monumental, pyramidal form swathed in black, plays for her. The scene seems to depict an intimate family moment as well as a pedagogical

78 Hippolyte Taine, École des Beaux-Arts lectures, Year 4 (unpublished, 1868), quoted in Eyerman, 134. 79 Edmond Duranty, “The New Painting” (1876), quoted in Distel, Gustave Caillebotte, 193. 80 Eyerman, 131. 81 Ibid., 136.

40 one, the matriarch representing appropriate female accomplishment while the child looks on.82

Cézanne‟s version of the theme, Tannhaüser Overture (c. 1869) (Fig. 20), depicts his sister and an older woman in a flattened and heavily patterned interior setting.83 At the left, the young woman in white sits stiffly at the piano, looking down at her hands in earnest as she plays.

Seated to her right on a red couch is a matriarchal figure (her mother, perhaps?), listening to the music as she concentrates on her needlework.84 The tense scene suggests a chaperone watching her young ward, a reminder that the piano was sometimes the site of contact and flirtation between men and women.85 Twelve years later, Caillebotte painted The Piano Lesson (1881)

(Fig. 21), an atypical work within the artist‟s oeuvre for its depiction of women.86 The compressed space contains the figures of two women. Both are seated at the piano, engrossed in a piano lesson, with their backs turned away from the viewer. The woman on the right conducts with her right hand as her student, donning a fashionable black hat, plays for her. In keeping with Caillebotte‟s primary artistic interest in depictions of labor, art historian Gloria Groom has interpreted this scene not as one of leisure—a leitmotif within images of women at the piano— but an image of labor.87 However, the depiction of a piano lesson is not atypical within woman-

82 According to Lynne Ambrosini, chief curator of the Taft Museum of Art, Whistler‟s At the Piano is “an utterly modern picture” through its unapologetically ambiguous depiction of a mother and daughter gathered around the piano wearing mourning dress and the painting‟s flat pictorial space. This work, which was rejected from the annual Paris exhibition in 1859, represents an early example of Whistler‟s modernism, and sets the tone for his later forays into aestheticism. See Lynne Ambrosini, “Modern Painting in 1859: Whistler‟s At the Piano,” Portico, Taft Museum of Art (Spring 2005): 15-16. 83 The title of this work refers to Tannhäuser (1842-1845), an opera written by Richard Wagner (1813-1883). A piano reduction of the Tannhäuser Overture very likely would have been available to amateur pianists such as Cézanne‟s sister. See Eyerman, “Piano-Playing in Nineteenth-Century French Visual Culture,” in Parakilas, 224. 84 According to Eyerman, preliminary compositions of this work also included a patriarchal figure seated in the white chair in the foreground. The reason for his absence is mysterious, and the significance of this omission can only be conjectured. See Eyerman, “The Composition of Femininity,” 137. 85 Eyerman, “Piano-Playing,” in Parakilas, 216. 86 This is the only known genre painting of women in Caillebotte‟s oeuvre. See Distel, et al., Gustave Caillebotte, 213. 87 Ibid.

41 piano paintings, and denotes the kind of working toward the cultivation of a feminine self that I have discussed in the first chapter.

Of all the Impressionists, Renoir was certainly the most dedicated to the woman at the piano theme. He depicted it at least eleven times during his career, most prodigiously in his series of six, nearly identically-composed depictions of two girls at a piano (1892). The French

State commissioned Renoir to create a work for the Musée du Luxembourg, and the artist responded by executing five oils and one pastel of girls at the piano in a quest to create the perfect composition and color harmonies. The French government purchased Girls at the Piano

(1892) (Fig. 22) in 1892, thus marking a major milestone in the artist‟s career.88 Loosely modeled after The Piano Lesson of 1889 (Fig. 23), the scene depicts two girls absorbed in their lighthearted music-making. One is seated at the piano in profile, leaning forward as she concentrates on the sheet music, her left hand turning the page and her right tentatively posed over the keys as if she were hesitatingly sight-reading. Her companion stands to her left, grasping the back of the pianist‟s chair in a gesture of familiarity and friendship and casually leaning her left elbow on the top of the piano. Composed in warm, subdued tones of orange, green, pink, and blue, the scene is tempered by the artist‟s soft, diaphanous brushstrokes, creating a dreamlike atmosphere in which the sentimental figures seem to embody idealized girlhood. Renoir fitted the girls in softly flowing dresses devoid of any signs of contemporary fashion, propelling them into the realm of the ideal.89 Their long hair tied back with ribbons and serene facial expressions further enforce this romanticized notion of young femininity.

88 Distel, et al., Renoir, 280. 89 According to Distel, “The girls in these paintings originate in an idealized type, full of softness, in which nothing remains of the naturalistic grisette, or young working woman, and in which the „modern‟ costume, still visible in the Omaha painting [The Piano Lesson], is stripped of the most obvious accessories of contemporary fashion.” Ibid., 280, 284.

These Impressionist artists were revolutionary in their ability to render life with a fresh optical fidelity, what art critic Paul Adam (1862-1920) praised as a gift for “convey[ing] the very first aspect of a visual sensation, without allowing the understanding to lead it astray with the male science of the eye, or to complicate it with hypothetical traits.…”90 The stark silhouette of

Whistler‟s figures, the blunt, geometric construction and flatness of Cézanne‟s scene, the highly compressed space of Caillebotte‟s painting, and the painterly brushwork of Renoir‟s canvas all mark formal innovations in composition and technique. However, their pictorial avant-gardism did not translate into an equally revolutionary interpretation of the formulaic woman at the piano theme. Eyerman has argued that in the hands of the Impressionists, “representations of the subject are hybrids that draw on and synthesize past art historical traditions, contemporary representations and social practices, and certainly, painters‟ individual and shared personal experiences.”91 I maintain that while these painters certainly did modernize the genre in formal terms, their treatment of the female figure in these works preserved the status quo as had developed in nineteenth-century France, characterized by the passivity of the youths, amateurism, and sentimentality that I explored in the first two chapters of this thesis.

More profoundly, however, the conventional nature of these works can be interpreted as the product of the dominant male gaze, which subjugated the woman‟s presence and rendered her an object. Throughout its history, male artists were the primary proponents of the woman at the piano subject, and it follows that the manner in which the theme developed was dictated by certain presuppositions concerning the ways in which men traditionally represented, and looked at, women.

90 Paul Adam, “Impressionist Painters,” La Révue contemporaine (Paris: 1886), in Art and Theory, 959. 91 Eyerman, 136.

SPACE AND LOOKING: THE SEEDS OF DISSIDENCE IN MORISOT’S PIANO PAINTINGS

When the pictorial subject of the woman at the piano is contextualized as a creation of male producers, certain iconographic tendencies present themselves as the result of the imbalance between the sexes in nineteenth-century society. As noted in the first chapter of this thesis, the intellectual capacities of women were perceived to be inferior to those of men.

Women‟s place in society, as I explored in the second chapter, was relegated to the private domain, whereas men moved freely between the public and the private spheres. These social constructions lent themselves to the development of a woman-piano theme that extolled the idea of proper femininity as a function of quiet poise, befitting the female demeanor, and dilettantism.

These aspects coalesce to produce an ideal image of nineteenth-century female identity, which is fundamentally a type constructed by the male producer. The male point of view that defined this theme was not necessarily one of sexual possession of the subject, but more generally that of male dominance over the ideal, passive female figure and an affirmation of sexual difference.92

These socially-ingrained ideas manifested themselves through artists‟ compositions of figures as well as their descriptions of space. It is from this masculine, hegemonic gaze that Morisot‟s piano paintings effectively broke free.

The conceptions of space and proximity in Le Piano and Lucie Léon au Piano are the initial ways in which Morisot rethought the male-dominated genre of piano portraiture.

Traditionally, this pictorial theme is characterized by a certain distance between the beholder and the subject. The figures may be shown in their entirety, as in Whistler‟s The Piano, Cézanne‟s

Tannhaüser Overture, and Renoir‟s The Piano Lesson, or cropped, as is the case in the latter‟s

92 Eyerman wrote that while the authors of these images were almost exclusively male, the subject was almost exclusively female, and the intended audience both male and female. I do not disagree with her assertion that these works were meant to be viewed by spectators of both genders, but this does not diminish the fact that the way in which the iconographic conventions of the woman at the piano theme evolved was a product of the male eye and masculine desire. See Eyerman, 16.

Girls at the Piano. In compositions that include the subject in its entirety, the distance that separates subject and viewer is plainly evident. However, even when the artist draws closer to the subject and portrays the scene only partially, a strict division is maintained between the subject and viewer. Although Renoir has denied the viewer a complete, omnipotent view in

Girls at the Piano by truncating their forms, he has consciously imposed a barrier between the spectator and the subject by including a sliver of a chair and, presumably, sheet music in the lower right corner of the composition. This detail, which emphasizes the distance between viewer and subject, is present in four of the five oil versions of the theme and thus presents itself as a significant addition to the composition.

This sense of distance from the subject is entirely absent from Morisot‟s piano paintings, which position the viewer as if seated directly to the left of the piano. The significance of this compositional decision is highlighted by Pollock‟s feminist analysis of female artists‟ structuring of space. Rather than creating a “space of sight for a mastering gaze,” female artists tend to adjust spatial proximity so that the space functions as “the locus of relationships.”93 Pollock suggests that the viewer‟s sense of nearness to the subject creates a relationship based on likeness and equality. In such works, “There is little extraneous space to distract the viewer from the intersubjective encounter or to reduce the figures to objectified staffage, or to make them the objects of a voyeuristic gaze.”94 In Le Piano and Lucie Léon au Piano, the spatial proximity between the girls and the viewer creates a relationship based on mutual identification rather than the tendency toward objectification of the subject that permeates male constructions of the woman at the piano motif.

93 Pollock, 124. 94 Ibid.

It might be argued, however, that a painting like The Piano Lesson by Caillebotte uses a similar compositional strategy in which the artist limits the space between the viewer and the subject. There is, however, more at work in Morisot‟s piano paintings that, in tandem with her reconception of spatial proximity, functions to assert a fresh interpretation of the woman-piano theme. The most basic means by which Morisot subverts the traditional active/male and passive/female dichotomy of the viewer/subject relationship in her paintings is by breaking with the tradition of absorption that dominates the theme, especially in the work of her contemporaries. All of the genre scenes at the piano discussed above—Whistler‟s At the Piano,

Cézanne‟s Tannhaüser Overture, Caillebotte‟s The Piano Lesson, and Renoir‟s Girls at the

Piano—position the female figures facing away from the picture plane. In doing so, the subjects are rendered thoroughly absorbed by their activity, and as a result completely unaware of the spectator. The beholder is free to look and appraise without being seen, to enjoy the image of a lovely young woman immersed in an appropriately feminine activity.

In both of Morisot‟s piano paintings, the artist experiments with a non-absorptive rendering of a traditionally absorptive theme. In Le Piano, Julie self-consciously turns to face the viewer. Compositionally there are many similarities between Renoir‟s Girls at the Piano and this canvas by Morisot, perhaps unsurprising given the close relationship and mutual artistic influence between the two artists at this point in their career.95 Both artists imagine a pair of young women positioned in front of the instrument, depicting one girl playing the piano while the other places her arm around her friend as a sign of their emotional bond. However, whereas

Renoir conceived of his musical duo as wholly immersed in their activity, Morisot has positioned

Julie so she interacts with the spectator, denying the viewer the right to look without being seen.

In Lucie Léon au Piano Morisot composed the scene so that Léon‟s body is parallel with the

95 Shennan, 266.

46 picture plane, but she has captured her presence at the moment she stops playing and turns her head to acknowledge the viewer‟s presence. Most simply, therefore, in both of Morisot‟s paintings the subjects return the viewer‟s gaze, denoting a kind of awareness of being seen that renders them active, rather than passive, figures in the beholder/subject relationship. This quality, when combined with the spatial proximity discussed above, creates a balance of power between viewer and subject.

Morisot‟s activation of the subjects in Le Piano and Lucie Léon au Piano can be interpreted as a product of not only the directness of their gaze, but also the artist‟s activation of the painting‟s surface that, in essence, confronts the viewer immediately and directly. Art historian Michael Fried has discussed this idea of material directness, or “facingness,” as he has termed it, with regard to Manet‟s work. In Fried‟s view, the essential feature of Manet‟s paintings in the 1860s was its direct and immediate acknowledgment of the viewer through his suppression of three-dimensional pictorial space and his flattening of forms so that the composition, in essence, “faces” the viewer. Fried writes that “what has always been taken as a declaration of flatness [in Manet‟s work] is rather the product of an attempt to make the painting in its entirety—the painting as a painting, that is, as a tableau—face the beholder as never before.”96 According to Fried‟s analysis, the fundamental difference between a painting with this quality of facingness and the truly absorptive, nontheatrical work is one of activity versus passivity. The latter reveals itself to the viewer little by little, establishing a “relatively passive

[relationship] with respect to the beholder (being apparently unaware of the beholder, it leaves it to him to come to terms with it in his own time)….”97 Its opposite, the type of work Manet created and very much in line with the idea of portraiture, is “essentially confrontational, is

96 Michael Fried, “Manet in His Generation: The Face of Painting in the 1860s,” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 1 (Autumn 1992): 53. 97 Ibid., 52

47 instantaneous and aggressive, almost threatening, almost alive, in its mode of address.”98 This idea of facingness as Fried defines it is entirely relevant to Morisot‟s work, which shared many formal concerns with the work of Manet.

The facingness of Morisot‟s piano portraits is a function of the activation of forms through her characteristic lively brushwork and her concomitant flattening of pictorial space in the interest of asserting the materiality of painting. In Le Piano, Morisot has composed the background as an undulating presence that vies for pictorial primacy with the foregrounded figures of the girls. The sheer force of her painterly technique nearly effaces the figures and objects in the painting, obscuring boundaries and thereby uniting forms as a gestalt.99 This compositional technique seems to have been a deliberate choice by the artist. As I have already noted in the first chapter of this thesis, the final version of this work departed compositionally and stylistically from the series of studies that preceded it. Not only has the direction of Julie‟s gaze changed over the course of Morisot‟s reworking of the scene, but the overall finish of the painting decreased between the preliminary studies and the final canvas.

If Le Piano represents Morisot‟s conscious creation of a painting that eschews the traditional conception of a rational, fictive space, then Lucie Léon au Piano can be regarded as a continuation of this exploration. Certainly the figure and objects in this work are more defined than those in Le Piano, but a similar phenomenon exists here whereby the background of the scene is paradoxically foregrounded. Morisot‟s long vertical strokes create a churning sea of blue paint that surrounds Léon. The sense of oneness between figure and ground is emphasized

98 Ibid. 99 Hopson also noted the way in Morisot obscured boundaries in her work, especially between Julie and Jeannie‟s figures. For Hopson, this melding of forms visually communicates the close physical and psychological bond between the cousins, “their complementary actions and feelings arising as (melodic) counterpoints to the same (musical) circumstance.” I maintain, however, that the effacement of forms is not limited to the conjoining of the girls with each other, but the girls with their surroundings, a device that Morisot also explored in Lucie Léon au Piano. See Hopson, 232.

48 by the predominance of blue throughout the canvas and the continuous verticality of Morisot‟s brushstrokes. The significance of Morisot‟s radical conception of space and her privileging of the medium lies in its facingness. There is a sense of wholeness to each work in which the scene strikes the viewer instantly and completely, ridding Le Piano and Lucie Léon au Piano of the passivity that characterized conventional treatments of the woman-piano theme.

Thus, Morisot‟s pictorial rethinking of the fictive space of conventional woman-piano portraits and her redefinition of the beholder/subject relationship created a wholly different interpretation of the theme. Although a significant number of male Impressionists took up this motif in their own work, the innovation in their versions was limited to essentially superficial changes in painterly style. At its core, the woman at the piano motif was historically a male construction, and Morisot‟s male Impressionist colleagues perpetuated an asymmetrical relationship between viewer and subject. Morisot‟s greatest contribution to this genre was her rethinking of this ingrained relationship and restructuring it from a fresh point of view.

CONCLUSION

Although Le Piano and Lucie Léon au Piano comprise a very small portion of Morisot‟s oeuvre, the significance of these works exists in their relation to the conventional iconography of the female piano portrait as it had developed in art and visual culture. As I have established, nearly all works in this genre through Morisot‟s era were the creation of male artists, and scholarship on the theme largely has ignored the female artistic perspective. Admittedly, aside from Morisot‟s works, there are very few instances of female-produced piano portraits in nineteenth-century French art. Louise Abbéma (1853-1927) is a rare example of another female artist who dabbled in the genre in her painting, Au Piano (c. 1880) (Fig. 24). However, the canvas falls into the same restrictive mold that had governed female piano portraiture in the nineteenth century and earlier. The woman playing the instrument is turned away from the viewer, her profil perdu indicating her intense interiority and dismissal of the viewer‟s presence, her hands daintily and statically posed over the keys. The dearth of female-produced piano portraits, as well as the conventionalism of extant examples, makes Morisot‟s works in the genre all the more intriguing and worthy of analysis.

The question that remains, perhaps, is why Morisot adopted a unique method of representation of the woman at the piano tradition. There is no definitive answer to this question, for there are no surviving documents that enunciate her feelings regarding this matter. Hopson has proposed that Morisot‟s use of the piano theme allowed her to challenge a standard iconographic marker of female identity, an assessment with which I agree and have endeavored to decode and explore in this thesis. Morisot‟s piano portraits act as foils to the conventional iconography, highlighting her personal conception of women‟s individuality and intellectual potential.

Morisot‟s simultaneous evocation and subversion of the conventions of female piano portraiture in her piano works in some ways parallels the late nineteenth-century emergence of the idea of the “new woman” in France. When she painted Le Piano and Lucie Léon au Piano, there had sprung into being the conception of a woman who challenged the firmly established code of femininity by incorporating traditionally masculine characteristics into her behavior and appearance.100 This nascent idea of the new woman was disseminated primarily through contemporary literature, and fueled by the posthumous publication of a journal by the unconventional female painter Marie Bashkirtseff (1858-1884).101 Historian James F. McMillan has noted, “For many sections of the press of the so-called belle époque, the new woman was most commonly represented as a dangerous creature, masculinized but man-hating, emancipated politically and sexually, a perversion of the natural order of things and a threat to morality and civilisation itself.”102 Certainly the aura of Morisot‟s piano portrait evokes some of the traits that characterized this progressive conception of femininity. The androgynous, short haircut Julie wears in Le Piano, Léon‟s powerful and tensed hands in Lucie Léon au Piano, and the self-aware gaze in both paintings demonstrated a new kind of piano girl, a younger, tamer variant of the new woman in France.

Judging from her extant letters and notebooks, Morisot‟s personal engagement with progressive feminist ideas was complicated. In some respects, she lived the life of a non- traditional woman. As a professional painter, she surpassed the amateur artistic training expected of bourgeois women and ventured into the male-dominated realm of artistic

100 According to historian Mary Louise Roberts, the fin-de-siècle new woman began to emerge in the 1890s and early 1900s, writing that “…all of these women challenged the regulatory norms of gender by living unconventional lives and by doing work outside the home that was coded masculine in French culture.” See Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 3. 101 James F. McMillan, France and Women, 1789-1914: Gender, Society and Politics (New York, NY: Routledge, 2000), 142. 102 Ibid., 142-3.

51 professionalism and public exhibitions, and in 1894 she sold a painting to the French government for placement at the Musée du Luxembourg.103 Although she married in 1874 and had a child in

1879, this occurred relatively late in her life, a fact that caused her mother much consternation.104

Morisot even kept her own name, at least professionally, so her work would not be confused with that of her brother-in-law, Édouard Manet. Despite these progressive steps, Morisot scholar

Margaret Shennan denies the artist any feminist sensibilities. In an 1879 letter to her sister Yves,

Morisot openly declared that she regretted her newborn daughter was not a boy “for the simple reason that each and every one of us, men and women, are in love with the male sex.”105 To this

Shennan retorted, “Thus at the lips of this supremely gifted woman came the strongest confirmation of her conventional maternal impulses and the clearest denial of any feminist antiversion.”106 Morisot‟s loaded statement, however, has less to do with her maternal impulses than it does her internalization of societal norms and values, and her words acknowledge the gender inequity that afforded greater freedom and status to men.

It is true that Morisot, a bourgeois woman raised in a traditional manner, was not a leftist radical. However, several passages from the artist‟s letters and notebooks suggest feminist inklings. An unpublished letter from 1890 reveals her familiarity with a popular memoir by Mrs.

Augustus Craven (1808-1891), which advocated “the sustaining power of sisterhood,” and

Bashkirtseff‟s journal: “I associated in my mind these two women‟s books: A Sister’s Tale and

103 The Musée du Luxembourg was a prestigious French museum for living artists. See Suzanne Glover-Lindsay, “Berthe Morisot: Nineteenth-Century Woman as Professional,” in Perspectives on Morisot, 85. 104 Madame Morisot‟s apparent distress is highlighted by a letter she wrote to her daughter Edma in 1871: “I am earnestly imploring Berthe not to be so disdainful. Everyone thinks that it is better to marry, even making some concessions, than to remain independent in a position that is not really one. We must consider that in a few more years she will be more alone, she will have fewer ties than now; her youth will fade, and of the friends she supposes herself to have now, only a few will remain.” Madame Morisot to Edma Pontillon, 22 June 1871, in Denis Rouart, ed., Berthe Morisot: Correspondence, trans. Betty W. Hubbard, with an introduction and notes by Kathleen Adler and Tamar Garb (London: Camden Press Ltd., 1986). 105 Berthe Morisot to Yves Gobillard, 1879, Berthe Morisot: Correspondence, 101, quoted in Shennan, 191. 106 Ibid.

[Bashkirtseff‟s]. Really, our value lies in feelings, intentions, and a vision more delicate than those of men; and if, by chance, pretension, pedantry, and affectation don‟t spoil us, there is much we can do.”107 This statement, though bound in some respects by the dominant nineteenth- century perception of women, indicates that Morisot indeed believed that women were more capable than popular opinion allowed. Another section from her notebook amplifies this sentiment: “I don‟t think there has ever been a man who treated a woman as an equal, and that‟s all I would have asked, for I know I‟m worth as much as they.”108

Morisot‟s interest in women‟s lives and their everyday activities is an undeniable fact.

Nearly two-thirds of the artist‟s oeuvre was dominated by depictions of women, and she gravitated toward subject matter drawn from people and places with which she was familiar. As

Higonnet observed, female artists like Morisot drew from their own experience in their work and chose to depict scenes and objects that had relevance to their own lives.109 Certainly the piano, given its emblematic associations with femininity and its prominent role in female bourgeois education, was a natural choice for a female artist whose subject matter was largely a product of her own experience. The piano portrait was also a way, as Hopson has noted, for Morisot to challenge the conventional iconography of the subject, and in doing so, implicitly suggest her idea of the modern woman. Morisot‟s call for a more egalitarian relationship between men and women in her private writings resonates in the often overlooked, but significant, Le Piano and

Lucie Léon au Piano.

107 Berthe Morisot, unpublished manuscript, 1890, quoted in Higonnet, 18-9. 108 Berthe Morisot, unpublished manuscript, n.d., quoted in Higonnet, 19. 109 Higonnet writes, “Etiquette books of the period, novels, moralistic tracts, and sociological essays all agree in assigning a gender connotation to the places and objects depicted with such persuasive frequency. Women certainly spent time in other places, used other objects; the ones they chose to use as visual self-expression were ones that stood for their roles as daughters, sisters, wives, mothers, and homemakers.” See Higonnet, 33.

IMAGES

FIGURE 1 Berthe Morisot Le Piano 1888 Oil on canvas 1 7 25 /2 x 31 /8 in. Private collection, New York, New York

FIGURE 2 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres The Kaunitz Sisters 1818 Graphite 7 3 11 /8 x 8 /4 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

FIGURE 3 Achille Devéria Prelude 1832 Lithograph In Journal des Femmes Dimensions unknown Musée Carnavelet, Paris

FIGURE 4 Victor Coindre Untitled illustration for sheet music “Maria, Romance” n.d. Lithograph Dimensions unknown Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris

FIGURE 5 Advertisement for “Musique en 30 lecons” 1845 Lithograph Dimensions unknown Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris

FIGURE 6 Berthe Morisot Two Girls at the Piano n.d. Charcoal 3 1 17 /4 x 20 /2 in. Location unknown

FIGURE 7 Berthe Morisot Julie Écoutant 1888 Oil on canvas 1 1 24 /2 x 18 /2 in. Private collection, New York

FIGURE 8 Berthe Morisot Julie Écoutant 1888 Oil on canvas 5 21 /8 x 15 in. Private collection, Paris

FIGURE 9 Berthe Morisot Le Piano 1888 Pastel on paper 5 7 25 /8 x 31 /8 in. Private collection, Paris

FIGURE 10 Berthe Morisot Le Mandoline 1889 Oil on canvas 1 3 22 /2 x 21 /4 in. Private collection

FIGURE 11 Marguerite Gerard La Leçon de Piano 1780s Oil on canvas 18 x 15 in. Location unknown

FIGURE 12 Berthe Morisot Lucie Léon au Piano 1892 Oil on canvas 1 1 25 /2 x 31 /2 in. Private collection, Michigan

FIGURE 13 János Jankó Franz Liszt at the Piano In Borsszem Jankó (April 6, 1873) Dimensions unknown

FIGURE 14 Gustave Caillebotte Young Man Playing the Piano 1876 Oil on canvas 1 7 31 /2 x 45 /10 in. Private collection

FIGURE 15 Pierre-Auguste Renoir Young Woman at the Piano 1876 Oil on canvas 5 1 36 /8 x 29 /8 in. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

FIGURE 16 Félix Vallotton Le Piano Plate IV from the series Six Musical Instruments 1896 Woodcut 5 3 12 /8 x 9 /8 in. Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York

FIGURE 17 Berthe Morisot Lucie Léon au Piano 1892 Oil on canvas 1 5 25 /2 x 21 /8 in. Location unknown

FIGURE 18 Berthe Morisot Lucie Léon au Piano 1892 Oil on canvas 1 5 25 /2 x 23 /8 in. Private collection, Paris

FIGURE 19 James McNeill Whistler At the Piano 1858-1859 Oil on canvas 3 1 26 /8 x 36 /8 in. Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, Ohio

FIGURE 20 Paul Cézanne Tannhaüser Overture c. 1869 Oil on canvas 1 1 29 /2 x 36 /5 in. Hermitage Museum, Russia

FIGURE 21 Gustave Caillebotte The Piano Lesson 1881 Oil on canvas 9 4 31 /10 x 24 /5 in. Musée Marmottan, Paris

FIGURE 22 Pierre-Auguste Renoir Girls at the Piano c. 1892 Oil on canvas 5 3 45 /8 x 35 /8 in. Musée d‟Orsay, Paris

FIGURE 23 Pierre-Auguste Renoir The Piano Lesson c. 1889 Oil on canvas 1 22 x 18 /8 in. Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska

FIGURE 24 Louise Abbéma Au Piano c. 1880 Oil on canvas Dimensions unknown Location unknown

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOKS Adler, Kathleen and Tamar Garb. Berthe Morisot. Oxford: Phaidon Press Limited, 1987.

Distel, Anne. Renoir. New York, NY: Abbeville Press, 2010.

Edelstein, Teri J., ed. Perspectives on Morisot. New York, NY: Hudson Hills Press, 1990.

Fourreau, Armand. Berthe Morisot. Translated by H. Wellington. New York, NY: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1925.

Garb, Tamar. Sisters of the Brush: Women’s Artistic Culture in Late-Nineteenth Century Paris. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994.

Harrison, Charles, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger, eds. Art and Theory, 1815-1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998.

Harrison, Charles. Painting the Difference: Sex and Spectator in Modern Art. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Higonnet, Anne. Berthe Morisot’s Images of Women. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Hiner, Susan. Accessories to Modernity: Fashion and the Feminine in Nineteenth-Century France. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.

Jacobus, Mary. First Things: The Maternal Imaginary in Literature, Art, and Psychoanalysis. New York, NY: Routledge, 1995.

Lévy, Marie-Françoise. De Mères en Filles: L’Education des Françaises, 1850-1880. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1984.

Manet, Julie. Growing Up with the Impressionists: The Diary of Julie Manet. Translated, edited, and with an introduction by Rosalind de Boland Roberts and Jane Roberts. London: Sotheby‟s Publications, 1987.

McMillan, James F. France and Women, 1789-1914: Gender, Society and Politics. New York, NY: Routledge, 2000.

Metzer, Paul. Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skills, and Self-Promotion in Paris During the Age of Revolution. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, Ltd., 1998.

Nye, Robert A. Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993.

Parakilas, James, et al. Piano Roles: Three Hundred Years of Life with the Piano. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999.

Perrot, Michelle, ed. A History of Private Life IV: From the First of Revolution to the Great War. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1990.

Pollock, Griselda. Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art. New York, NY: Routledge, 1988.

Roberts, Mary Louise. Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Rouart, Denis, ed. Translated by Betty W. Hubbard. With an introduction and notes by Kathleen Adler and Tamar Garb. Berthe Morisot: Correspondence. London: Camden Press Ltd., 1986.

Shennan, Margaret. Berthe Morisot: The First Lady of Impressionism. Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing Limited, 1996.

CATALOGUE RAISONNÉE Clairet, Alain. Translated by Jean-Alice Coyner. Berthe Morisot, 1841-1895: Catalogue Raisonné de l’Oeuvre Peint. Paris: CÉRA-nrs, 1997.

DISSERTATIONS Eyerman, Charlotte Nalle. “The Composition of Femininity: The Significance of the „Woman at the Piano‟ Motif in Nineteenth-Century French Culture from Daumier to Renoir.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1997.

Hopson, Robert Randolph. “The Symbolist Portraiture of Berthe Morisot.” Ph.D diss., The University of Iowa, 2002.

EXHIBITION CATALOGUES Distel, Anne, et al., Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist. Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Musée d‟Orsay/Chicago, IL: Art Institute of Chicago/New York, NY: Abbeville Press, 1995.

Distel, Anne, et al. Renoir. London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1985.

Mongan, Elizabeth, et al. Berthe Morisot: Drawings/Pastels/Watercolors/Paintings. New York, NY: Tudor Pub. Co., 1960.

ARTICLES Ambrosini, Lynne. “Modern Painting in 1859: Whistler‟s At the Piano.” Portico, Taft Museum of Art (Spring 2005): 15-16.

Ellis, Katherine. “Female Pianists and Their Male Critics in Nineteenth-Century Paris.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 50, No. 2/3 (Summer-Autumn 1997): 353-385.

Fried, Michael. “Manet in His Generation: The Face of Painting in the 1860s.” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 1 (Autumn 1992): 22-69.