genre painting – my daily art display

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin. Part 4. The second Mme. Chardin and scenes of domestic life.

Chardin was taken seriously ill, both physically and mentally in 1742. It was probable that his temporary decline in health was due to the extreme sadness he suffered due to the passing of his loved ones. Chardin and Marguerite Saintard were married in February 1731. Two months later, his father, Jean Chardin, died. Marguerite Saintard who had given birth to Chardin’s son and daughter died in April 1735 and a year later his daughter, Marguerite-Agnès, also died aged three. Chardin was appointed guardian to his son, Jean-Pierre in November 1737. Chardin and his son were now living in a Paris apartment in rue du Four, sub-let to him by his mother. Apart from the deaths of members of his family, the other aspect of his life which probably contributed to his illness was his dire financial situation. He owed his mother for the money she had loaned him after his wife died and he had run up debts with his supplier of painting materials. His financial position worsened even further when his mother, Jeanne-Françoise, died in November 1743.

Chardin needed to improve his financial position. He had already decided to move away from still-life paintings and concentrate on genre works which once made into engravings provide him with much-needed income from the popular prints. Still, money or lack of it, remained a problem for forty-five-year-old Chardin but this was all to change in 1744 when he married his second wife, Françoise-Marguerite Pouget at Saint-Sulpice Church on November 26th 1744. Françoise was the thirty-seven-year-old wealthy widow of Charles de Malnoé and eight years Chardin’s junior. Françoise was simply a God-send to Chardin. She saved him from abject poverty and helped him manage his correspondence and his responsibilities on behalf of the Salon, which included arranging the exhibitions and acting as treasurer, from 1755, during which time he was tasked to manage the Académie accounts. Françoise-Marguerite Pouget gave birth to Chardin’s daughter, Angélique-Françoise in October 1745 but sadly the baby died in April 1746.

The Serinette (also known as The Bird Organ) by Chardin (1751)

Françoise-Marguerite Chardin appeared in a number of her husband’s works, one being The Sertinette or The Bird Organ which he completed in 1751 and was exhibited at that year’s Salon as Lady Varying Her Amusements. A serinette was a small barrel organ originally designed for teaching cage birds to sing. The painting is housed at the Louvre which acquired it in 1985. It was the first Royal order passed to Chardin, originally commissioned by Le Normante de Tourneheim, keeper of the King’s estates, for Louis XV but two years later, was gifted by the king to the Marquis de Vandières, the brother of Mme de Pompadour, the king’s favourite. In the painting we see a lady, modelled by Chardin’s wife, Françoise, with the help of a “serinette”, teaching the caged bird to sing. The setting for the painting is a bourgeois interior. The woman wears a cap tied under neck and a delicate white scarf-like narrow piece of clothing, worn over her shoulders, similar to a stole and known as a tippet. The tippet she wears partially covers a dress embroidered with flowers. The lady is seated and on her knees is the serinette which she activates by turning the handle. At the left of the painting we see a bird’s cage resting on a pedestal. The pedestal has a crossbar which allows one to fix a screen to protect the serin, a small finch-like bird, from the light and from distractions which would hamper it from learning a tune. It was with the help of this salon instrument that the ladies of the “good” society taught their caged birds to sing. In front of the woman, we can see a large work bag which contains her embroidery.

The Geographer by Johannes Vermeer (1669)

Light streams into the room through the window to the left similar to depictions seen in seventeenth century Dutch paintings – think Vermeer for example, and they obviously had an influence on Chardin.

The Serinette (also known as The Bird Organ) by Chardin (1751)
The Frick Collection, New York

Another version of the painting is in the Frick Collection in New York, which came from the collection of Dominique-Vivant Denon, the director of the Musée Napoléon and bought by the New York gallery in 1926. There is one major difference between the two versions and I will leave you to spot it!

Chardin’s 1746 painting Domestic Pleasures also featured his second wife. The painting was commissioned by Lvise Ulrike, the sister of Frederick the Great of Russia and the wife of Adolf Frederick the Crown Prince of Sweden and the country’s future king. However, the commissioning was far from straight forward. Lvise Ulrike was a great fan of Chardin’s paintings and wanted him to paint two works and she gave him the titles of them to be The Strict Upbringing and The Gentle, Subtle Upbringing. Unfortunately for her, Chardin was a slow painter which in a letter dated October 1746, he stated:

“…I take my time because I have developed the habit of not leaving my paintings until, to my eyes, there is nothing more to add…”

Chardin’s assertion that it was diligence and being a perfectionist were the reasons for the long time he took on each painting was challenged by others who put it down to his laziness. The princess was however not amused by this slow pace. Bizarrely Chardin finished the two paintings in 1746 but the subjects had nothing to do with the titles supplied by the princess. They appeared at the 1746 Salon entitled Domestic Pleasures and The Housekeeper and were subsequently given to Lvisa via the Swedish ambassador in Paris in February 1747.

Portrait of Françoise Marguerite Pouget by Chardin (1775)

My last offering of a Chardin painting, featuring his wife, Françoise-Marguerite Pouget, is his pastel work entitled Portrait of Madame Chardin, née Françoise-Marguerite Pouget which he completed in 1775 when he was seventy-six and which can now be seen in the Louvre. A year later he repeated the portrait, which is now housed in the Art Institute of Chicago. Before us we see the face of Chardin’s second wife, sixty-eight-year-old Marguerite Pouget. Her face is wrapped to the eyes in an almost nun-like headdress, a head covering which often featured in Chardin’s paintings. Her forehead has an ivory pallor. Look how a shadow is cast by the headdress and the daylight on her temple is filtered through its linen material. Her mouth is closed tightly and she is not smiling. Her gaze is frosty. There is a dullness about her eyes. We detect wrinkles around her eyes. Chardin has managed to create all the indicators of old age. Chardin’s use of colours is masterful. The whiteness of her face is achieved with pure yellow and the pallid face has no white in it at all. The pure white cap is made solely of blue. The art critics loved the portrait. The eighteenth-century writers, publishers, literary and art critics, the brothers Edmond, and Jules de Goncourt wrote:

“…it is in the portrait of his wife that he reveals all his ardour, his vitality, the strength and energy of his inspired execution. Never did the artist’s hand display more genus, more boldness, more felicity, more brilliance than in this pastel. With what a vigorous, dense touch, with what freedom and confidence he wields his crayon; liberated from the hatching that previously damped his voice or obscured his shadows. Chardin attacks the paper, scratches it, presses his chalk home……To have represented everything in its true colour without using the real shade, this is the tour de force, the miracle that the colourist has achieved…”

The Turnip Peeler (also known as Die Rübenputzerin) by Chardin (1738)

Chardin produced many genre paintings in the late 1730’s and early 1740’s which depicted female servants carrying out their household duties. There are three versions of The Turnip Peeler which he completed around 1738. One is housed in the National Gallery of Art in Washington whilst one can be found in the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen in Munich. The third version was previously in Berlin, acquired for Frederick II of Prussia but which is now lost. The Washington version was exhibited at the 1739 Salon by Chardin and bought around that time by the Austrian ambassador, Prince Joseph Wenzel of Liechenstein. It became part of the Washington National Gallery collection in 1952. Before us we see a large woman sitting slightly hunched on a chair, knife in hand, about to peel a turnip. She gazes out blankly, lost in thought. She is surrounded by other vegetables such as a large pumpkin, some cucumbers and a bowl of water which contains the previously scraped turnips. In front of her we see a copper cauldron and a saucepan which is leaning against a bloodstained butcher’s block, in which a meat clever has been driven. This genre piece by Chardin is not one which has an anecdotal element to it, neither has it any social comment about the plight of servants.

The Return from the Market by Chardin (1738) Ottawa’s National Gallery of Canada,

A painting which has connections with The Turnip Peeler is The Return from Market. Once again, three versions of this painting exist. One, dated 1738, is in Ottawa’s National Gallery of Canada, and was presented to the Salon in 1739. One is at Schloss Charlottenburg in Berlin and is dated 1738, and the third is housed in The Louvre. It is believed that the version held in Berlin was a companion piece to The Turnip Peeler, with the two being acquired by Frederick the Great in 1746. This painting unlike its companion piece still survives, but only just, as it was found in the park at Charlottenburg after the Schloss was pillaged by Austrian troops in 1760. Since that time this work by Chardin has never left Berlin. An engraving by François-Bernard Lépicié was made from the Louvre version. Lépicié made engravings of a number of Chardin’s paintings and prints from the engravings were a great source of income for the artist. When the painting was exhibited at the 1739 Salon it received great critical acclaim. The French literary brothers, Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, wrote about the work stating:

“…the colours placed side by side give the painting the appearance of a tapestry in gros point…”

While the writer Henri de Chennevières was even more enthusiastic when he wrote about Chardin’s use of colour:

“…the milky whites of the woman’s skirt, the unique faded blues of the apron….., the floury, golden crust on the loaves of bread. And the two bottles on the floor, the red seal on one of them echoing the ribbon on her sleeve…”

My final two paintings by Chardin in this blog are his small pendant works, (49 x 39cms), The Diligent Mother and Saying Grace, both of which were completed in 1740. Chardin gave both works to Louis XV in the November following their showing at the Salon and are now housed at The Louvre. The Diligent Mother was the less famous of the two works and depicts a young mother, wearing pink slippers and blue stockings, her scissors hanging at her waist as she and her daughter inspect a piece of embroidery. In the foreground, by her, we see a wool winder and skein with coloured balls of wool inside the base of it. A bobbin can be seen lying on the floor as well as a box which acts as a pin cushion, next to which is curled-up pug. To the extreme right we see a red fire screen, while behind the mother stands a large green folding screen which prevents the light from the half-open door entering the room. The work was considered to be a genre piece in which a well-to-do middle-class mother shows the daughter a mistake she has made in her tapestry. One other interesting fact about this work was when an engraving was made of it by the engraver François-Bernard Lépicié, he added lines of moralistic verse to it so as to explain what was depicted:

“…A trifle distracts you my girl
Yesterday this foliage was done
See from each stitch you have made
How distracted your mind is from work
Believe me, avoid laziness
Remember this one simple truth
That hard work and wisdom together
Are more valued than beauty and wealth…”

Were these salutary words approved by Chardin? Are they Chardin’s or Lépicié’s words?

The final Chardin painting for today’s blog is entitled Saying Grace and is one of his most celebrated and most popular of his works. The theme of the painting is prayer before meals and was one of the most famous works by Chardin but when it was shown at the 1740 Salon it received very little praise. However, along with its pendant piece, The Diligent Mother, it was given to Louis XV. It remained in the royal collections until the French Revolution; it then entered the Muséum Central des Arts, which would later become the Louvre, in 1793. It was largely forgotten until the nineteenth century when Chardin was “rediscovered”. It was then that the work was hailed as being emblematic of a morally upright, industrious social class and was often contrasted to the debauched, wasteful lifestyle of the aristocracy. Chardin in this tender work depicting a mother teaching her children to pray highlights commendable and hidden qualities and like many of his genre works, once again depicts the satisfied life which comes from a sense of duty, unlike the Rococo painters of the time, such as François Boucher, who depicted the dalliance and flirting of the nobility and upper-classes at their garden luncheons, and moonlit promenades.

In my final blog about Chardin I will be looking at his latter days and his works of portraiture.

Elizabeth Jane Gardner – the resolute and tenacious artist.

Elizabeth Jane Gardner by William Bouguereau (1879)

The artist I am looking at today is the American, Elizabeth Jane Gardner. If you read my last blog, which was the conclusion of the life of the French Academic painter William Bouguerau, you will know that Gardner was his second wife. This is not a story about the wife of a famous painter dabbling with art. This is a story about the fighting spirit of an acclaimed painter – a great artist in her own right, although it has to be said that she was often criticised because much of her work resembled her husband’s genre pieces.

Elizabeth Jane Gardner was born in October 1837. Her birthplace was the town of Exeter in the American state of New Hampshire. It was here that she attended junior school. After completing her regular school education in 1853, she attended the Lasell Female Seminary at Auburndale Massachusetts. The college, which was founded in 1851, was named after its founder Edward Lasell, who was a great believer in female education. It was at this college that Elizabeth studied languages and art. She graduated in 1856 and for the next few years was a teacher of French at the newly opened Worcester School of Design and Fine Arts in Massachusetts.

Whilst she had been studying art at the Lasell Seminary she would often question the teaching she received but it dawned on her that the foundation of all good painting stemmed from the ability to master the art of drawing. It was probably during the time spent in her art classes there that she nurtured the desire to one day, go to Europe and live and study art in Paris, which was then, the capital of the art world and the Mecca for all European and American artists. This artistic ambition to savour French life and its art was probably delayed by the American Civil War and her dream was not realised until 1864, when she and her former art teacher at the Lasell Seminary, Imogene Robinson, set sail for France. They got themselves a flat in Paris and that summer obtained licenses as copyists at the Louvre and the Musée du Luxembourg. For the duration of that summer they fulfilled artistic commissions from America by copying paintings in the collection of the prestigious galleries which they also sold to the locals. However Elizabeth’s main reason for coming to Paris was to receive further artistic tuition at one of the prestigious art academies and so in the autumn she applied to enter L’École des Beaux-Arts, the foremost art institution. She was horrified that her application was rejected, not on the grounds of her ability but on the grounds of her sex. L’École des Beaux-Arts, like many art establishments at the time, had a male-only admissions policy and refused to admit females into their hallowed corridors. The banning of women from the L’École des Beaux-Arts was not lifted for another thirty-five years, in 1897.

Whether it was her and her American companion Imogene’s need to fulfil their initial aim for coming to France, to receive tuition from an established artist or whether it was the simple fact that the public art galleries were not heated and copying works of art in the cold establishments became less pleasant, the women gave up their commissioning work and in the winter of 1864 they looked for an artist who would provide them with some tuition. Established artists were happy to nurture and teach aspiring artists provided they could pay. The more the student was willing to pay the better the class of artist who would become their tutor. Elizabeth’s companion Imogene was in a much better financial situation than Elizabeth and was able to secure Thomas Couture as her mentor and tutor whereas Elizabeth who was not as well off settled for a lesser-known painter Jean-Baptiste-Ange Tissier, whose students were mostly women.

Portrait of Elizabeth Gardener Bouguereau by her husband William Bouguereau (1895)

Elizabeth Gardner was a resolute and determined character and was not going to be put off by red tape and sexist bureaucracy of the art academies and so devised a plan on how she would gain admission to one of the Parisian art schools. Before she had left the shores of America, she had been ill and had lost a lot of weight and had had to have her hair cropped short. Her figure had taken on a boyish appearance which part facilitated her ingenious plan. She decided to pose as a young lad but for a woman to walk the streets of Paris dressed as a male she had to have permission from the Paris Police Department! The law was passed on November 17^th 1800 when Paris city chiefs had placed the order on the statute books that required women to seek permission from the police if they wanted to “dress like a man.” The order was issued at the end of the French Revolution when working-class Parisian women were demanding the right to wear pants in their fight for equal rights. Parisian women activists, during the Revolution, had also requested the right to wear trousers as a political gesture and like their male working-class revolutionaries became known as “sans-culottes” for wearing trousers instead of the silk-knee breeches preferred by the bourgeoisie. It was modified in 1892 and 1909 to allow women to wear trousers if they were “holding a bicycle handlebar or the reins of a horse”. Such an old fashioned law! Actually not, for it was only in January 2013 that the French Minister of Women’s Rights, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, said that the ban was incompatible with modern French values and laws and although it had been ignored for many years it was only right that the law was officially repealed and so French officials invalidated the 213-year-old order that forbade women in Paris to dress like men and wear trousers. The French government had been opposed to women wearing trousers for it was a simple method of preventing women, who dressed as men, from gaining access to certain offices or occupations which were male-only domains.

The rear of the Gobelin Factory (c.1830)

Elizabeth’s plan worked, for in 1865, she successfully applied to the drawing school of the prestigious Gobelin Tapestry factory which was best known as a royal factory supplying the court of Louis XIV and later monarchs. At the beginning she was accepted as a young lad but after a while her fellow students and instructors realised that she was actually a young woman. Whether it was because of her outstanding drawing ability or her determined personality, one may never know, but despite the discovery of her sex, she was allowed to stay.

In the Académie Julien in Paris by Marie Bashkirtseff (1881)

One person, who was also impressed with her ability and strength of mind, was Rodolphe Julian. He had established the Académie Julian in 1868 as a private studio, a school for art students. The Académie Julian was a kind of feeder school for art students who wanted to later gain admission to the École des Beaux-Arts as well as offering independent training in arts. At that time, women were not allowed to enrol for study at the École des Beaux-Arts, but this new Académie Julian accepted both men and women, albeit they were trained separately, but most importantly, women participated in the same studies as men, which included access to classes which taught the basis of art – drawing and painting of nude models. The Académie Julian was particularly popular with aspiring American artists for it did not have an admission’s precursor of having to be able to speak French.

Whether it was beginners luck or just the fact that she had become a successful and talented artist but in 1868 she had two of her painting accepted by the Salon jury. To have a painting exhibited at the Salon was a great moment in the life of an aspiring painter. It was not just in recognition of their talent but it enhanced the value of their future works. Elizabeth was delighted and wrote home to her parents:

“…when the ex’n opened both of mine were hung in full view among foreign artists and raises the value of what I paint…”

Elizabeth Gardner’s works were often found in the annual Salon exhibitions and in the exhibition catalogues she, like many other artists whose works were on show, would often name the well know artists who had taught them. This was an attempt by artists to boost their status and their “artistic bloodline”. It is by looking at these catalogue entries that we know that Elizabeth received tuition from Hugues Merle, a contemporary and friend of Bouguereau from 1868 to 1874. The name of the artist, Jules-Joseph Lefebvre was added in catalogues in 1875 as was the name of William Bouguereau from 1877 onwards.

Moses in the Bullrushes by Elizabeth Jane Gardner (1878)

In 1878 Elizabeth Gardner put forward a religious painting for inclusion at that year’s Salon. It was entitled Moses in the Bulrushes. She had started the work the previous year and was pleased with its progress. In December 1877, she wrote about her progress with the work to her brother, John, who was back home in Exeter, New Hampshire:

“… I have advanced my picture of little Moses a good bit this month. The canvas is now covered and now comes what is to me the hardest part. I have always ideas enough for nice subjects but it is so hard to make the reality come up to the dream. I get sometimes quite frantic over it…”

The work was accepted by the Salon jurists and exhibited in 1878. The Arts critic of the American Register, a newspaper for expatriate Americans living in Paris wrote in the April 6^th edition:

“…‘Miss E. J. Gardner has just completed her picture for the Salon, Moses in the Bulrushes. The subject is taken at the moment when Moses has just been placed amongst them, and his sister has parted the bulrushes to watch the approach of Pharaoh’s daughter, who is seen in the distance. The expression of anguish in the mother’s face is especially well rendered, and the coloring is remarkably fine…”

The fact that she had put forward a religious painting for inclusion at the Salon was a brave move as history and religious paintings were looked upon as the highest form of art genre. It was a genre that was also looked upon as being artistically, a male-only domain and female artists were often discouraged from attempting such works. However as we know, Elizabeth Gardner was a strong-minded person and never shied away from controversy if she believed her course of action was right. Her submission of this religious work entitled Moses in the Bullrushes, put her in direct competition with her male counterparts. It was also interesting to note that her take on the event portrayed was from a female perspective. She had depicted the two women, the mother of the baby and the Pharaoh’s daughter, as courageous women who were saving the life of the baby, Moses.

As the sale of her paintings increased with her popularity, so her financial situation improved. Things got even better in the late 1870’s when the renowned Paris art dealer Goupil began purchasing her work and in the 1880’s her work was so much in demand that the prestigious Knoedler art dealership of New York, was buying her Salon paintings, sight unseen. This art dealership had formerly been a subsidiary of the Parisian art dealers, Goupil & Cie.

Elizabeth had reached one of her most sought-after ambitions in 1868 – to have one of her paintings exhibited at the Paris Salon. However Elizabeth was not one to rest on her laurels and her next ambition was not only to have her work hung at the Salon exhibition but that it was deemed worthy of an award. She had to wait another nine years for that happening.

One of Elizabeth Gardner’s artistic mentors was William Bouguereau. Elizabeth and her companion Imogene were living in a flat in rue Nôtre-Dame des Champs in the Montparnasse district of Paris, the same street in which Bouguereau and his family resided. Elizabeth became known to the family and was on friendly terms with Bouguereau’s wife, Marie-Nelly. William Bouguereau and Elizabeth Gardner must have become quite close during this time as, eight months after the tragic death in childbirth of Bouguereau’s wife in April 1877, the grieving widower proposed marriage to Elizabeth. Elizabeth was happy to accept but Bouguereau’s mother and daughter Henriette were horrified. The daughter threatened to leave home and join a convent if a marriage took place but this threat was never tested as Bouguereau’s of the vociferous, sustained and obdurate opposition from his mother to the formalising of the partnership was enough to halt any proposed wedding plans. However the couple became engaged in 1879 and Elizabeth wrote about Bouguereau, their betrothal and her thoughts about his mother. In a letter she wrote:

“…And now about my engagement…. I am very fond of Mr Bougereau and he has given me every proof of his devotion to me. We neither of us wish to be married at present. I have long been accustomed to my freedom. I am beginning to attain a part of the success for which I have been struggling so long. He is ambitious for me as well as I for myself. As it is I can’t help working very much like him. I wish to paint by myself a while longer. He has a fretful mother who is now not young, 78 I think. She is of a peevish, tyrannical disposition and I know she made his first wife much trouble…”

Elizabeth and Bouguereau continued to work together and seemed happy or maybe just resigned, to accept a long drawn out courtship.

The Farmer's Daughter by Elizabeth Jane Gardner (1878) — The Farmer’s Daughter by Elizabeth Jane Gardner (1878)

The realisation of Elizabeth’s ambition to be awarded a medal at the Salon came in 1887. By this time, the popularity of her work had surged and she had been inundated with commissions but her mind was focused on her Salon entries and in December 1886, she wrote to her brother John of her desire to achieve that ultimate success:

“…I must work to get a medal in Paris and not for money a while longer. All will come right in time I am confident if I work hard and am patient…”

In a letter to her sister Maria in January 1887, she again sounded both resolute and optimistic about her award prospects:

“…I am bound to get a medal some year…”

Finally in 1887 the Salon awarded her a medal (third class) for her work entitled The Farmer’s Daughter. The idea for the painting came to Elizabeth whilst she was on a painting trip in the countryside. Whilst out, the weather turned nasty and a downpour ensued. She took refuge from the rain by sheltering in a farmer’s barn and it was whilst there that she saw the farmer’s daughter feeding the hens and ducks. So impressed by what she saw, she decided to make a quick sketch of the scene which led to the finished prize-winning work. The painting is a depiction of unspoiled rural living and must have been seen as a breath of fresh air in comparison to paintings by the up-and-coming Impressionists depicting city scenes and the onset of modernity. Gardner’s tranquil scene would probably have made many people want to exit the city and sample the peacefulness and serenity of the countryside and was for the owner of such a painting, it was a reminder of how life was in simpler days.

The award she received for her work was the first and only medal that was ever bestowed on an American woman painter at the Paris Salon. She was ecstatic and on May 30^th 1887, she wrote to her brother John back in America:

“…My pictures at this year’s Salon have just received the medal which I have waited for so many years. I hasten to write you by the first mail for I know you will All sympathize with me in my happiness. The jury voted me the honor by a very flattering majority – 30 voices out of 40 ….No American woman has ever received a medal here before. You will perhaps think I attach more importance than is reasonable to so small a thing, but it makes such a difference in my position here, all the difference between that of an officer and a private, and I hope it will be a good thing for the sale of my paintings. I made an extravagant risk in my large one this year. Monsieur Bouguereau is very happy at my success. He is as usual President of the Jury, it is his great impartiality which has so long kept him in office. He has always said that I must succeed through my own merit and not by his influence. I hope to send some photos soon….I have nearly a hundred letters of congratulation and dispatches to acknowledge today. I have begun by the dear ones at home…”

This work by Elizabeth was to receive further awards when it was exhibited in the Gallery of the United States at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1889 where it was awarded a bronze medal. To understand how great an achievement this was, one has to remember she was up against some of the finest American painters such as Thomas Eakins, William Merritt Chase and John Singer Sargent.

The Imprudent Girl by Elizabeth Jane Gardner (1884)

The work was exhibited along with another of her works, the somewhat controversial, L’imprudente (The Imprudent Girl).

Elizabeth and William Bouguereau had been courting for seventeen years, unable to marry for fear of crossing Bouguereau’s mother who was adamant that the couple should not marry. However in 1896 his mother died aged 91 and the couple wasted no time in getting married. The colour of Elizabeth’s bridal gown was black and white because, as she explained, although it was her wedding day, she was still in mourning for Bouguereau’s mother. The groom was 71, and the bride 59 years of age. Elizabeth wrote home about their change in circumstances:

“… The old lady died on February 18^th at the age of 91. Her devoted son who had borne with such affectionate patience all her peculiarities was quite afflicted by the change [in her health]. He had so long had the habit of subordinating every detail of his life to her desires, of which the first was to rule without opposition in his house…”

After marrying Bouguereau, Elizabeth almost stopped painting altogether and spent most of her time looking after her husband and his studio. When asked why she stopped painting she simply replied:

“…He was alone and needed me. I abandoned the brush…”

She did not resume her painting career until after his death nine years later and it was then that she signed all her works in her married name.

One other of Elizabeth Gardner’s painting of note was completed just before she married William. It was another religious painting entitled The Shepherd David and was based on a passage from the Old Testament story (1 Samuel 17:34):

“…And David said unto Saul, “Thy servant kept his father’s sheep, and there came a lion and a bear and took a lamb out of the flock…”

The work depicts David demonstrating his worthiness to fight Goliath when he tells the tale of how he, as a shepherd, battled with wild beasts which were menacing his flock. In the painting Elizabeth has shown the young David kneeling in triumph on a dead lion while at the same time grasping a lamb under his right arm. He looks upward towards the heavens, with his left arm raised in recognition that God had given him the strength to fight off the wild animals. Elizabeth was proud of the painting and wrote to her sister Maria in America that she full expected to see her painting receive full-page coverage as one of the best works of art in 1895 in Goupil’s, the esteemed Parisian art dealers, art directory.

Elizabeth and William worked happily together from their studio in rue Nôtre Dame des Champs and, even at the age of 78, Bouguereau took his new wife to Italy a country he hadn’t visited since 1850 when he had won the Prix de Rome prize and the stay at the Villa Medici. The couple would spend their summers away from the claustrophobic atmosphere of the French capital and return to the calming ambience of his birthplace, La Rochelle. It was here that William Bouguereau died of a heart attack on August 19^th 1905, three months short of his eightieth birthday. His body was transported back to Paris and he was buried in the Cimetière de Montparnasse.

Art critics of the time often disapproved of Elizabeth’s painting style, saying that it copied too closely the style of her husband. However Elizabeth was unrepentant and was very proud of her work and in a 1910 interview stated:

“I know I am censured for not more boldly asserting my individuality, but I would rather be known as the best imitator of Bouguereau than be nobody!”

The similarity in style between works painted by her and her husband was probably a financially astute decision as she was well aware that this genre of art, the sentimental secular works, was very popular with the public both in France and even more so in America where clients could not get enough of her and her husband’s art.

Elizabeth Jane Gardner Bouguereau, a native of New Hampshire will be remembered as the feisty young woman who challenged the French art establishment. She was proud to be different and by so doing, signposted the way for many other women to challenge the stranglehold that males had on the world of art. Elizabeth died at her summer residence in St. Cloud, a western suburb of Paris in January 1922 aged 84 and was buried, like her husband William, in the Cimetière de Montparnasse in Paris.

If you are interested in the life and work of Bouguereau and Elizabeth Gardner I do suggest you buy the excellent book, Bouguereau by Fronia E. Wissman, an author who has written or contributed to a number of books about French artists.

A Winter Scene with a Man Killing a Pig by David Teniers the Younger

A Winter Scene with a Man Killing a Pig by David Teniers II (c.1650)

I think there is an adage, or maybe it was just advice I was once given, that says you should be happy with what you have or maybe it was that you should just want what you have. There is certainly an element of truth in that as I can always remember a disastrous policy my former company brought out in making it known to all the employees what each person earned by publishing the grades of each employee and having a separate list of salary against each grade. Up to that point nobody knew what each other earned and most people had, until then, been reasonably happy with their remuneration but once they found out what their colleagues earned there were unmerciful screams around the building.

So what has all this got to do with art? The reason I bring this up is that as I told you the other day I went to see the Group of Seven and Tom Thomson exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London and a large number of them focused on winter in Canada. The winter scenes were well executed and very lifelike. However the problem came when I decided to have a look around the rest of the Gallery and its permanent collection and came across a winter landscape by David Teniers the Younger and really, in my mind, it was in a different class to those of the Canadian artists. I was completely amazed by the works of the Canadian artists until my eyes focused on Teniers’ work. Of course, by now you know I love Dutch and Flemish art and therefore I am slightly biased with my comparison but I thought I would let you compare the two styles and see what you think.

David Teniers the Younger was born in Antwerp in 1610. His father was David Teniers the Elder, also an artist, as were his son David Teniers III and grandson, David Teniers IV. His artistic connections don’t end there as his wife, Anna, was the daughter of Jan (Velvet) Brueghel the Elder and granddaughter of the Master himself, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. His initial art training came from his father whose artistic talent would soon be eclipsed by his son, who would become the most famous, most revered and most prolific of the Teniers’ family of artists. Adriaen Brouwer, who at the time was well known and well loved for his everyday scenes, greatly influenced Teniers during his early career as did Rubens who was his wife-to-be’s guardian. At the age of twenty-two he was registered in the Antwerp Guild of St Luke and would later become deacon of that painter’s association.

In 1637 he married Anna Brueghel. The major part of Anna’s dowry was made up of pictures and drawings completed by her grandfather, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and her father, Jan Brueghel. Teniers spent much time studying these beautifully crafted works of art and they proved to be significant in the development of Teniers’s genre painting. In the year of his marriage to Anna Breughel, Teniers painted his first genre work entitled Peasant Wedding, which hangs in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. It was the period between 1640 and 1650 that art historians believe Teniers produced his finest works. His expertise at depicting village scenes with large crowds of people, often in an open landscape was breathtaking. There was often an element of humour in his paintings and warmth in the way his characters were depicted on his canvases. In many of his works one could recognise the influence of the Bruegel family.

In 1651, David Teniers and his family moved to Brussels and besides carrying on his own art business he took up the post of court painter and the director of the art gallery of the Spanish governor-general, Archduke Leopold-Wilhelm. If you look back to My Daily Art Display of January 18^th you will see a painting Teniers completed entitled Archduke Leopold William in his Gallery at Brussels, which precisely documented some of the famous works from the Archduke’s collection. Whilst looking after this vast collection Teniers made many small-scale individual copies of paintings in the Duke’s collection by foreign artists, especially the paintings of the Italian Masters. Of these, two hundred and forty-four were engraved in 1660 under the title Theatrum Pictorium.

On the death of the Archduke Leopold-Wilhelm his successor, Don Jon of Austria continued to employ Teniers as court painter and in 1663 Teniers founded the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp which still exists and is one of the oldest of its kind in Europe. David Teniers the Younger was a highly productive artist and when he died in 1690, he left more than two thousand works. Most of the major galleries of the world exhibit a number of his works. He was an extremely good businessman and was highly liked by the aristocracy. Teniers knew the type of art the people liked and was very astute when it came to following the latest fashions and whims of his clients. His art work covered numerous subjects from portraits and religious scenes to genre pictures and still-life paintings. Teniers died at the age of seventy-nine in Brussels, five years after the death of his eldest son, David Teniers III.

The featured work for My Daily Art Display today is a painting David Teniers the Younger completed around 1650 and is entitled A Winter Scene with a Man Killing a Pig. The painting is amazing. It just glows in front of your eyes. An art historian and contemporary of Teniers summed up the beauty of this painting when he wrote:

“…For the richness of his golden and silvery light, for the delicacy of his vivid colours there is only one word, and that word is ‘magical…”

Before us we see a winter landscape and in some ways reminiscent of Teniers’ wife’s grandfather, Pieter Brueghel’s work, Hunters in the Snow another winter landscape painting completed almost a hundred years earlier. As well as being a landscape painting it is also a genre picture which does not offer us an idealized landscape, but instead provides us with a window for us to see real people getting on with their daily lives in a real setting. Snow lies deep on the ground and by the looks of the dark clouds there is more snow to come. Look how the artist depicts the rays of weak sunlight forcing their way through the clouds to light up the frosty winter scene.

Work on the farms almost came to a halt at wintertime giving time to the peasants to take the break from working the fields and well-earned time to sleigh and skate. To the left of the painting we see some houses. In front of the nearest house, a pig is about to be slaughtered. Although we may cringe at the depiction of the killing it should be remembered that in Teniers time this would be a common practice. It marked a time of celebration and we see emerging from the end house, a woman carrying a baby and an old man, dressed in black, leading out a young child so they could witness the scene. The butcher kneels on the animal while a woman holds out a pan to collect the blood. Every part of the carcass will be used. The children would be given the pig’s bladder so that they could blow it up and use it as a ball. The skin, once the hair had been singed off it, would be used as a kind of leather, maybe for shoes. The flesh from the large animal would provide meat for their meals all the way to Lent, at which time, the staple food would switch to fish until the end of the “fast” and the arrival of Easter.

So now you have seen an early twentieth century Canadian winter scene and a mid-seventeenth Dutch winter scene and I will let you choose which you prefer

The Cottage Dooryard by Adriaen van Ostade

After looking at the younger of the two brothers, Isack, yesterday I am switching my attention to the elder and more famous brother Adriaen van Ostade. Adriaen was born in Haarlem in 1610, eleven years before the birth of his brother Isack. He started off his artistic training at the age of seventeen under the watchful eye of Frans Hals, the Dutch Golden Age painter and great portraitist. Adriaen Brouwer, the Flemish genre painter was a fellow student of van Ostade. His father Jan Hendricks Ostade, a weaver by trade, came from Ostade near Eindhoven and although his sons were born in Haarlem they took Ostade as their family name.

At the age of twenty-two he registered as an artist in Utrecht. At this time Adriaen concentrated on genre painting incorporating village scenes which were very popular with people at that time. His scenes often depicted animated scenes of peasants partying and fighting in crowded inns and disorderly living rooms. It is interesting to note that his later paintings depict a more civilised community with people displaying much better behaviour and the interiors of the depicted dwellings began to look more orderly and appealing. He also started to add more outdoor scenes to his works and in general the atmosphere was lighter and more cheerful. He returned to Haarlem in 1634 and enrolled in the painter’s guild of the town, the Haarlem Guild of St Luke in which he was later to become its president in 1666 and 1667. In 1637 he joined the Haarlem Schutterij, a voluntary city guard, sometimes termed a citizen militia, the role of which was to protect the town or city from attack and act in case of revolt or fire. It is interesting to note that these militiamen were generally drawn from the wealthier families and this could mean that van Ostade was doing well with the sale of his art.

Adriaen was aged sixty-two in 1672 which was known as the rampjaar, the “disaster year” when his country was plunged into war and was invaded. He decided to leave Haarlem and so he packed up his belongings and headed for Lübeck. However on reaching Amsterdam he met an art collector, Konstantyn Sennepart who convinced van Ostade to stay and who offered him lodgings in his house.

We know that van Ostade was highly productive and it is believed that he completed over 800 paintings together with a further two hundred drawings and watercolours. Besides his own art, he taught young several aspiring artists at his workshop in Haarlem, such as his younger brother Isaack van Ostade, Cornelis Bega and it is believed that he also trained Jan Steen. Unlike many artists whose popularity only came after their death, Adriaen van Ostade attained considerable popularity during his lifetime and his style and work were often copied by other artists.

My Daily Art Display today features one of Adriaen van Ostade’s later paintings entitled Cottage Dooryard which he painted in 1673 and now hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Before us we see a peasant’s country cottage and its courtyard. Unlike the dwellings of the more wealthy, this courtyard has neither a manicured garden nor a paved yard. This is simply a dirt yard. At the centre of the painting we see the wife seated busily preparing mussels for the family dinner. She has already done the washing which we see hanging out on the line which is attached to the shed. On top of the shed we can see some carrots which are drying in the sun, and an old barrel. Also atop the shed we can see a pigeon coop and by the door there is a shelf which holds beehives. A mass of clinging vines cascade down from around the eves of the house and the inclusion of the vines is thought to indirectly refer to family unity Four of her children amuse themselves in the courtyard, two of them playing with their dog whilst another tends the baby. A hen pecks away happily at the ground searching for a morsel of food and the husband, leaning on the door jamb, looks on. Although this is a peasant scene, it is a dignified and poignant scene of family life and there is no sign of the bawdy scenes of van Ostade’s earlier genre paintings. It is a beautiful work of art and I love how van Ostade has incorporated great detail into the painting such as his depiction of the brickwork, the windows with their small glass panes and the floor of the yard