Women’s lives
American Impressionism and Realism: Virtual tour
Childe Hassam 1859–1935 | Avenue of the Allies, Great Britain, 1918 1918 | Oil on canvas | 91.4 x 72.1cm (36 x 28?in.) | Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot(1876–1967), 1967 | 67.187.127 | Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Childe Hassam 1859–1935 | Peach blossoms – Villiers-le-Bel c. | Oil on canvas | 54.6 x 46cm (21? x18?in.) | Gift of Mrs J Augustus Barnard,1979 | 1979.490.9 | Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
J Alden Weir 1852–1919 | The factory village 1897 Oil on canvas | 73.7 x 96.6cm (29 x 38in.) | Gift of Cora Weir Burlingham, 1979, and Purchase, Marguerite and Frank Cosgrove Jr Fund, 1998 | 1979.487 | Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
George Bellows 1882–1925 | Tennis at Newport 1919 | Oil on canvas | 101.6 x 109.9cm (40 x43?in.) | Bequest of Miss Adelaide Miltonde Groot (1876–1967), 1967 | 67.187.121 | Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
John Singer Sargent 1856–1925 | Mr and Mrs IN Phelps Stokes 1897 | Oil on canvas | 214 x 101cm (84? x 39?in.) | Bequest of Edith Minturn Phelps Stokes (Mrs IN), 1938 | 38.104 | Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Winslow Homer 1836–1910 | Northeaster 1895 | Oil on canvas | 87.6 x 127cm (34? x 50in.) | Gift of George A Hearn, 1910 | 10.64.5 | Collection: The Metropolitan Museum ofArt, New York
Cecilia Beaux 1855–1942 | Ernesta (Child with nurse) 1894 | Oil on canvas | 128.3 x 96.8cm (50? x38?in.) | Maria DeWitt Jesup Fund, 1965 |65.49 | Collection: The MetropolitanMuseum of Art, New York
Mary Cassatt 1844–1926 | The cup of tea c.1880–81 | Oil on canvas | 92.4 x 65.4cm (36? x25?in.) | From the Collection of JamesStillman, Gift of Dr Ernest G Stillman, 1922 | 22.16.17 | Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Around 1900, the American domestic sphere was altered as women began to move more freely in society; postponing marriage and motherhood; and seeking higher education, employment, suffrage, social reform and entertainment. Progressives urged women to venture from home, while conservatives applauded them maintaining and enhancing their traditional roles as wives and mothers.
Insulating themselves and their potential patrons from disquieting change, the American Impressionists portrayed beautifully dressed women – often family members and friends – in sheltered settings. Interiors were often filled with antique furniture that implied reassuring tradition; sunny gardens were often situated in art colonies or other old-fashioned country retreats distant from urban stress. Images of idle women taking tea, reading, strolling, primping or reflecting on nothing in particular embodied the prevailing notion. This notion – that a woman at leisure announced her husband’s or father’s wealth and status – was articulated in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) by Thorstein Veblen. When the American Impressionists depicted women at work, they focused on mothers caring for their children or absorbed in old-fashioned handicrafts – crocheting, sewing or knitting – and this underscored the shift to factory work and machine manufacture by less privileged women.
While the Realists recorded more diverse and more liberated women, even they declined to document the period’s social upheaval.
Australia
In the decades from the 1880s to the 1920s, the character of women’s lives, at least in developed countries, changed markedly. They gradually achieved the vote, and moved into new forms of employment outside the home, with many ‘new women’ gaining a degree of independence, and a privileged few, among them the Australians Violet Teague and Agnes Goodsir, entering artistic fields with a degree of success.
These women were, in a sense, social pioneers. In Australia, the Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902 allowed some women in the newly independent country to vote at federal elections, and to stand as candidates for federal parliament – among the first women in the world to do so – yet, the home continued to be the focus of life for many women. For the most part, too, Australian artists depicted women in the setting of middle-class life in the first decades of the twentieth century as relaxed and leisurely, confident and optimistic. Even Rupert Bunny’s The letter, for instance, painted in Europe during World War One, belies the harsh realities of war with his choice of an everyday subject and the lively treatment of colour and light outdoors, freely borrowed from the Impressionists.
During the years immediately before and after the war, Australian women artists such as Agnes Goodsir began to join their male counterparts in Europe in increasing numbers. They travelled, studied and worked abroad for significant periods while maintaining their connections to Australian life and, in the postwar years, they made increasingly adventurous decisions regarding their artistic education. Their lives as artists during this period staked a certain claim to independent living for women.
John Singer Sargent
1856–1925
Two girls with parasols 1888
Oil on canvas
Gift of Mrs Francis Ormond, 1950
Acc. 50.130.13
Sargent appears to have first met the French Impressionist painter Claude Monet at the second Impressionist exhibition at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in Paris, in 1876. The young American became an admirer and visited Monet at Giverny several times between 1885 and 1891. The treatment of Two girls with parasols, painted during a visit to Calcot Mill in the Berkshire countryside of England, reflects Sargent’s admiration for the French master. This spontaneous and rapidly executed sketch includes Sargent’s sister, Violet (then 18, at left) and a friend during a walk in the country. The dappled sunlight filtered through the branches of the trees forms the central focus of the picture, rather than a likeness of the girls. The fleeting immediacy of the work recalls a fundamental tenet of Impressionism, while the inclusion of parasols also evokes Monet, whose portrayals of women with parasols Sargent would have seen in Paris.
William Merritt Chase
1849–1916
For the little one c.1896
Oil on canvas
Amelia B Lazarus Fund, by exchange, 1917
Acc. 13.90
Between 1891 and 1902, Chase summered at Shinnecock, a rural beach community in the town of Southampton, on the south shore of Long Island. He taught two days each week at the Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art, and spent the rest of his time painting or enjoying the company of his large family at their colonial-style house. In For the little one, Chase’s wife, Alice, is seen sewing in the entry hall of their home. Typical of Chase’s Shinnecock paintings is the sense of domestic tranquillity. ‘The little one’ of the painting’s title probably refers to daughter Helen, who was born in 1895. Chase includes the miscellaneous antique furniture, rugs, decorative fabrics and pictures that were features of his summer residence, but it is the play of light across Mrs Chase and all the interior elements, including the floor’s reflective surface, that forms the focus of the work.
Frederick Carl Frieseke
1874–1939
Woman with a mirror (Femme qui se mire) 1911
Oil on canvas
80.6 x 81cm (31? x 32in.)
Gift of Rodman Wanamaker, 1912
Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
In 1912, Frieseke articulated his dedication to plein-air painting to an interviewer for the New York Times, explaining that his principal subject was ‘sunshine, flowers in sunshine; girls in sunshine; the nude in sunshine’. Frieseke settled in Giverny, France, in 1906, where he took the subjects of women, gardens and light as his principal subjects. In Woman with a mirror, Frieseke substitutes a bright, vibrantly decorated bedroom in his Giverny home for a garden setting. The model is shown looking into a hand mirror while a large wall mirror behind doubles her reflection. Frieseke admired the work of Titian and other old masters who had also explored the subjects of Venus and mirrors as allegories of love, vanity and beauty.
Mary Cassatt
1844–1926
The cup of tea c.1880–81
Oil on canvas
From the Collection of James Stillman, Gift of Dr Ernest G Stillman, 1922
Acc. 22.16.17
The cup of tea features the artist’s sister, Lydia and portrays an activity closely associated with late nineteenth-century gentility and femininity. Her elegant dress, hat and gloved hands indicate that she is a guest, rather than the hostess, on this particular occasion, and also signify her elevated social position. This concern for anecdote rather than elaborate narrative is an affinity Cassatt shared with the Impressionists with whom she exhibited in Paris. Their preoccupation with light is also seen here in her careful rendering of reflected light and colour, allowing the warm, glowing pink of Lydia’s dress to tint the saucer, the arm of the chair and the white lace at her throat.
Mary Cassatt
1844–1926
Mother and child (The oval mirror) c.1899
Oil on canvas
HO Havemeyer Collection,
Bequest of Mrs HO Havemeyer, 1929
Acc. 29.100.47
Cassatt began to explore the subject of motherhood extensively during the 1890s. During the late nineteenth century, women – especially mothers – were viewed as humanity’s guardians of decency and virtue, and Cassatt appears to have used the subject of mothers and children not to suggest a limiting domesticity, but rather to highlight their strength. In her painting of a mother tenderly embracing her young son, Cassatt underscores the importance of the maternal bond by evoking religious art. The pose of the mother and infant recalls Italian Renaissance images of the Virgin and Child, a suggestion reinforced by the oval mirror framing the boy’s head like a halo. Cassatt’s quotations from art history originated in her close study of the old masters, both at the Louvre in Paris and during her trips to Italy and Spain. Although she was a member of the Avant-garde, she remained interested in, and influenced by, tradition.
Rupert Bunny
1864–1947
The letter 1914–16
Oil on canvas
Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth
Painted in France during World War One, the intimate garden setting of The letter is executed in an Impressionist manner – dappled light and brushstrokes gently rendering two elegant, modern women (although Bunny once said he lost interest in painting women when skirts got shorter). Art historian Mary Eagle has noted changes in Bunny’s art between 1913 and 1922, as it shifted from oriental and classical iconographies to a greater interest in decorative surfaces. In 1911, he returned to Australia for a triumphant visit after an absence of 27 years and, in 1912, he was elected a Sociétaire of the New Salon. Yet, a period of experimentation and uncertainty followed his return to Paris from Australia, very likely caused by the distress of the war.
In The letter, the seated woman on the left is recognisably Bunny’s French wife, Jeanne, his chief model. While the safe enclosure of the garden is as far from the horrors of the front as can be imagined, the outside world is alluded to by Jeanne’s companion, who is reading a letter. The significance of written correspondence during this time – for news about loved ones affected by the war – charges this painting with particular meaning.
