January 2009

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This teeming, charming harvest of luxe and calme (but not volupté) brings together the pupils, disciples, friends and sometime lover of Manet and Degas: Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot and, in the second 11, Marie Bracquemond and Eva Gonzalès. (The three French painters are rarely seen in America). All of them capture the dreamy quality of elegant and apparently tranquil women – decorated by bonnets, parasols and lapdogs; absorbed in knitting, reading and taking tea – who seem to be longing for some mode of life beyond their domestic constraints.

Marie Bracquemond, born in Brittany, the daughter of a sea captain, had her promising career extinguished when she was 50 years old by her artist-husband, who was hostile to her art. Her Winter Landscape (undated) recalls Saul Bellow’s description of Monet’s Sandvikan, Norway (1895) in Humboldt’s Gift: ‘a house, a bridge, and the snow falling. Through the covering snow came the pink of the house, and the frost was delicious. The whole weight of snow, of winter, was lifted effortlessly by the astonishing strength of the light.’

The woman in Eva Gonzalès’s Reading in the Garden (1880-82) is not actually reading, but folds her hands in her lap and rests them above the red-tipped pages of the green-cloth book. Sitting sideways in the two-toned green garden, she wears a two-toned grey dress. She leans slightly forward, with a dark mane of hair running down her back, and with her up-tilted nose and breasts matching the upward tilt of her explosive red hat. The red hat is nicely balanced by the red parasol that stands against a canvas seat, directly in front of her and suggestively upright.

Mary Cassatt’s portrait of her 73-year-old mother, Katherine Kelso Cassatt (1889; Fig. 2), an invalid with heart disease, is tender and sympathetic. Her solid black dress, contrasting with her white cashmere shawl, widens from her lace-wrapped neck and cameo brooch, and flows down to the bottom of the picture. She rests her chin on the bent fingers of one hand while the other clutches a handkerchief (suggesting tears). Staring sadly into space, her pallor in need of a cosmetic mortician, she appears to be contemplating the approach of death.

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