I am “on the road again.” I will share this new adventure with you soon. In the meantime, learn about two artists who were “champions of woman’s ability to stand alone.”
Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt are queens of 19th century female impressionists, but did you know that they were advocate for women’s equality?
Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) was born in affluence in Bourges, France, approximately 150 miles south of Paris. In the late 1850s, she traveled to Paris with her sister to study the Old Masters at the Louvre. In her late 20’s, she met artist Édouard Manet, marrying Manet’s brother six years later. The Manet’s were upper class, therefore, Berthe could pursue her painting career. However, due to Parisian “rules of decorum” Morisot couldn’t venture alone to the bars, cafés, and theaters where her male colleagues found their subjects. “Morisot painted outdoors when she could, a dicey practice at a time when respectable, unaccompanied women passed their lives under what amounted to house arrest—she was liable to be stared at by passersby and flocked by children,” art critic Peter Schjeldahl explained.
Because she was a female artist, Morisot’s paintings were often labeled as being full of “feminine charm” by male critics, for their elegance and lightness. In 1890, Morisot wrote in a notebook about her struggles to be taken seriously as an artist: “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, for I know I’m worth as much as they.” Morisot was never commercially successful during her lifetime. She did, however, outsell several of her fellow Impressionists, including Monet, Renoir, and Sisley.
Berthe Morisot
The cerulean blue that Morisot uses in passages of the turned figure’s coat was only introduced as a pigment in the 1860s. It was still a visual novelty, as was the cadmium yellow used in parts of the women’s hats. What’s more, the earth tones that Morisot adds here and there were totally out of vogue with the Impressionists. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/berthe-morisot-summers-day-three-things-to-know-1904573
Born only three years later, American Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) was an outspoken advocate for women’s equality, campaigning with her friends for equal travel scholarships for students in the 1860s, and the right to vote in the 1910s. As a successful, well-trained artist who never married, she depicted the “New Woman” of the 19th century. Cassatt’s brush revealed the “tragedy and beauty of women’s lives in the 19th century, giving voice and dignity to the often overlooked domestic sphere.”
Cassatt and her contemporaries enjoyed the wave of feminism that occurred in the 1840s, allowing them access to educational institutions at newly coed colleges and universities, such as Oberlin and the University of Michigan. Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley opened their doors during this time. Cassatt began studying painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine in Philadelphia in 1859 but due to slow instruction and condescending attitudes of the male students and teachers, she decided to study the old masters on her own. She later said: “Female students could not use live models, until somewhat later, and the principal training was primarily drawing from casts.” Although Cassatt did not explicitly make political statements about women’s rights in her work, her artistic portrayal of women was consistently done with dignity and the suggestion of a deeper, meaningful inner life.
Mary Cassatt, 1890.
Can you imagine what their worlds could have been if they were born a century later?
McKown, Robin. The World of Mary Cassatt. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co. 1972.
Schjeldahl, Peter. “Berthe Morison Woman Impressionist Emerges From the Margins.” The New Yorker. Oct 29, 2018.
