self doubts from Pissarro...

On a visit to Paris with my friend we went of course to the Père Lachaise Cemetery where unexpectedly I found Pissarro's grave at the end of the row for Jewish graves. The trees seemed heavy and old above this quiet corner. I recalled the words of self-doubt from the great artist: "I have just concluded my series of paintings...sometimes I am horribly afraid to turn round canvases which I have piled against the wall; I am constantly afraid of finding monsters where I believed there were precious gems!"

Pissarro is shown with his wife Julie in Pontoise 1877. She was his mother's maid when he got her pregnant, which must have made for some interesting banging of doors at home. Lack of financial stability wore hard on her as she waited for her gentle husband to make his fortune in art.

Mary Cassatt and her sister Lydia

In 1877, Cassatt's parents and sister Lydia came to live in Paris with Mary who was struggling to gain some place in the art scene. As Mary had decided not to marry (and "dwindle into a wife"), Lydia was her close companion whom she painted several times. But Lydia was ill and after five years in Paris, she died. For a time Mary was too bereaved to work.

There is a lovely, thoughtful novel about the Cassatt sisters called "Lydia Cassatt reading the morning papers" by Harriet Scott Chessman. The portrait shown is Lydia two years before she died as painted by Mary.

the blunt and gifted Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt’s parents objected to her becoming a professional artist, but even so this American painter moved to Paris to study in 1866 (the year Claude Monet met his love Camille) with her mother of course as chaperone. Women could not attend the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts at that time, so she studied privately. After some years, Mary returned to America and but later she was able to settle in France once more with her family, including her beloved sister who was in poor health. A blunt woman, Cassatt was welcomed by the newly banded impressionists whom one critic thought were such bad painters that they were “afflicted with some hitherto unknown disease of the eye.” Cassatt did not think so. She wrote, “We are carrying on a despairing fight and need all our forces.” Encountering Degas, she knew she had found her light.

More to come about this remarkable artist in further posts!

studio in the rue de la Condamine

One afternoon when many of his artist friends were visiting, the congenial painter Frédéric Bazille took up his brush and made a fast portrait of all of them. Experts differ on the identity of some of them, but Edouard Manet is before the easel and the men on and below the open stair may be Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir. When the painting was nearly done, impetuous Manet snatched the brush and pushed Bazille into place to paint him into his own picture...a bit too tall. Bazille's good friend Edmond plays the corner spinet to entertain them all. It would not be until four years later that the painters would have their first independent exhibition and be called impressionists.

lovely and gifted Berthe Morisot

Here is a portrait of the lovely young artist as seen by her colleague Edouard Manet (who was rather in love with her). Born into a good Parisian family in 1841, she and her sister Edma showed a much stronger gift for painting than the usual well-bred girls of their age who would make pretty watercolors and tuck them in an album to show visitors. Art was her joy and torment, for she never felt she was good enough though her work was warmly welcomed by her fellows Pissarro, Renoir, Monet and others for display in the first impressionists' exhibition. The critics and some of the public, however, were scandalized by the exhibition's paintings which they called merely sketches; one man even shouted that modest Berthe was a whore. Pissarro promptly punched him in the face.

Much more to come on her exquisite work!

Monet's bad design for wallpaper....

The first exhibition of the impressionists met with much negative criticism when it opened in 1874. Art critic Louis Leroy called his review "The Exhibition of the Impressionists", thus giving them their name. Of the famous Impression: Sunrise, Leroy wrote that "wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape."

Oddly today on the web one can find Monet's great painting as....wallpaper! But the price is slightly lower than the original hanging in the Musée Marmotton, Paris. I wonder if Leroy would still claim his opinion was right? We must be grateful to the silly man for naming this beloved school of painting, anyway!