Berthe Morisot

Calgary Sketch Club April and May 2021 Message from the President “It is important to express oneself ... provided the feelings are real and are taken from your own experience.” ~ Berthe Morisot And now warmer weather invites us outside, into the fields and gardens to experience nature, gain an impression, paint a record of our sensations. Welcome to a summer of painting. Whether you take your photos and paint in the studio or make the time to sit amidst the dynamic landscape, get out and experience the real colours, shapes, and shifting light. Your paintings will be the better for having authentic emotional content. This spring we were able to enjoy a club meeting dedicated to Plein Aire painting, a technical painting method that supported the development of the Impressionism movement. While some people may be familiar with the men who worked in impressionism, Monet, Manet, Gaugin, and so on, few dwell on the contribution of women painters to the development and furthering of painting your sensations, impressions, and experiences. After viewing work by Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzales, Marie Bracquemond and Lilly Cabot Perry, we see a sizable contribution to the oevre from the depths of meaning and exciting brushwork of these pioneering artists. The social cultural milleau of 1874 Paris, it was difficult for women to find equal footing or even acceptance as artists. And no matter that the art could stand beside that of any con- temporary man or woman, it was sometimes not enough. However, time has allowed a fuller examination of their work and its place in the impressionist canon. As you can see from the examples show below many of these women went out and painted their experiences and emotional responses of everyday life in outdoor (and indoor) settings. A tremendous body of exciting work. Enjoy the enclosed article written by Tessa Solo- mon and published in Artnews July 2020. editor: Rosemary Clappison email: [email protected] 1 President’s message, con’t The Women of Impressionism: Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, and Other Pioneering Figures Who Shaped the Movement by TESSA SOLOMON in ARTnews – edited for CSC Newsletter When the Impressionists debuted their work as a group in 1874, critics were quick to label their art “feminine.” Their canvases were small, their pastel palettes were too gauzy, their brushstrokes were too loose. Slic- es of everyday life—seascapes and English gardens, mothers and daughters— appeared in the place of moralizing historical scenes. “Only a woman has the right to rigorously practice the Impressionist system,” critic Téodor de Wyzewa wrote in 1891. “She alone can limit her effort to the translation of impressions.” In 19th-century France, women were largely unable to obtain a formal art education, as studying the nude form was considered scandalous. But the constraints placed on women did not end within the studio. Unmarried women were barred from leaving the home without a chaperone, and they were expected instead to tend the household or pass time with decorative arts in the company of other women. Female Impressionists—many of whom have been undervalued or out- right ignored by the historical canon—exploited these confines, producing intro- spective works that dealt with their makers’ societal conditions. In 1894, critic Henri Focillon singled out three of them as the “Les Trois Grandes Dames,” or “The Three Great Ladies,” of the movement: Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, and Marie Bracquemond. The trio acted as peers and friends to the movement’s top members. Édouard Manet, for example, was a great admirer of Morisot’s auda- cious brushwork—so much so, in fact, that he reportedly displayed a small collec- tion of her paintings in his bedroom. These women’s revolutionary sensibilities allowed them to channel interior states that were often unknowable to their male counterparts; only recently have they begun to get their due. Below is a guide to some of the pioneering female members of Impressionism, as well as a few notable artists who followed their lead. editor: Rosemary Clappison email: [email protected] 2 President’s message, con’t Berthe Morisot (1841–95) Berthe Morisot is the best-known of the female Impressionists, having been given a solo retrospective that traveled Europe and North America starting in 2018. Born in 1841, Morisot first showed at the age of 25 at the 1864 Paris Salon. Morisot was the only woman invited to show in the first Impressionist exhibition (formerly called the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors and Printmakers) in 1874, and she went on to participate in all but one of the eight exhibitions between from 1874 to 1886. She was close with Manet, even mar- rying his brother, and the two influenced each other, in a way that ultimately moved her work in bolder, more abstract directions. She painted with loose, bold brushstrokes that emphasized expressivity over naturalism. A critic wrote at the time, “Her painting has all the frankness of improvisation; it truly is the impression caught by a sincere eye and accurately rendered by a hand that does not cheat.” In the The Garden at Maurecourt (ca. 1884), she depicts a mother gazing at her child with little sentimentally, perhaps even boredom or exhaustion. With its probing depiction of its sitter’s mental state, the painting exemplifies Mor- isot’s sensibility. Morisot died of pneumonia in 1895, at the age of 54, leaving behind an oeuvre that hints at the further breakthroughs she was poised to make. Berthe Morisot, The Garden at Maurecourt, ca. 1884 editor: Rosemary Clappison email: [email protected] 3 President’s message, con’t Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) Mary Cassatt was the only American among the founding Impressionists. She came from a well-off family in Pittsburgh that supported a formal arts education first at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and then in Europe, after the vaunted Philadelphia school rebuffed her requests to study nude models. During her travels throughout the continent she learned under academic mentors such as Jean-Léon Gérôme and Édouard Frère and studied classical masterpieces by Correggio, Ve- lázquez, Rubens. She settled in Paris in 1874, where she began regularly showing her portraits in the Salon. In 1877 Degas invited her to begin showing with the Im- pressionists, and she participated in four of the eight exhibitions. “No woman has the right to draw like that,” Degas reportedly said upon viewing Cassatt’s Young Women Picking Fruit (1891). She took the thinly veiled insult in stride, and the two main- tained a close friendship based on a shared respect for asymmetrical composition and classical Japanese prints. Cassatt supported herself as a successful portrait art- ist and printmaker, having declared herself unfit for marriage or motherhood. In spite of this, her subject was often. the relationship between mothers and their children. In contrast to Morisot’s bold, expressive brushwork, Cassatt often depicted her the facial features and figure of her friends and family with great precision. In The Boat- ing Party, the man’s expression is obscured, placing the focus on a deftly rendered woman and child. Cassatt once said her goal was to depict women as “subjects, not objects.” Mary Cassatt, The Boating Party, 1893–94 editor: Rosemary Clappison email: [email protected] 4 President’s message, con’t Eva Gonzalès (1849–83) Gonzalès never exhibited with the Impressionists, but she was close with some of the movement’s top artists—including Morisot—and her art is stylistically similar to their work. Like other aspiring female artists in 19th-century France, Gonzalès was barred from attending the École des Beaux-Arts, though like Morisot and Cassatt, her affluent upbringing af- forded her the opportunity to attend private lessons. In 1869, she met Manet in Paris, and she became his only formal student. His influence on her work is evident in A Box at the Theatre des Italien‘s flat perspective at the subject’s direct gaze. The year they met, Manet created a portrait of Gonzalès, and in response she produced her own series of self-portraits, asserting her identity as professional peer—something far more than a muse. She died in 1883 at age 34 from an embolism after the birth of her son, having achieved her goal of exhibiting in the prestigious Paris Salon. In 1885, a 90-piece retrospective of her work was held at the Salons de la Vie Moderne in Paris. Eva Gonzalès, A Box at the Theatre des Italiens, 1874 editor: Rosemary Clappison email: [email protected] 5 President’s message, con’t Marie Bracquemond (1840–1916) Marie Bracquemond did not enjoy the same financial support which allowed her peers to flourish creatively and commercially. She was largely self-taught, with her one major instance of official art education having come via the painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, with whom she was invited to study. Despite Ingres’s prestige, Bracquemond eventually left his studio, writing that the older painter “doubted the courage and perseverance of a woman in the field of painting.… He would assign to them only the painting of flowers, of fruits, of still lifes, portraits and genre scenes.” In Paris, her vivid, large-scale plein air scenes garnered the at- tention of the Impressionists, who invited her to exhibit with them. Brac- quemond showed three times with the group, but amid pressure from her husband, the French painter and engraver Félix Bracquemond, she was forced to abandon her promising painting career. Marie Bracquemond, On the Terrace at Sèvres, 1880 editor: Rosemary Clappison email: [email protected] 6 President’s message, con’t Cecilia Beaux (1855–1942) Philadelphian-born Cecilia Beaux rose to become one of the preeminent portrait painters of her generation.

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