IN 1874, an art exhibition was held at the former Paris studios of the photographer Nadar, which has gone down in the annals of art history. On the deep-red walls hung paintings of dancers, laundresses, bathers, racing, theatre scenes and landscapes. The artists included Degas, Cézanne, Pissarro, Renoir and Monet, who had banded together to display their avantgarde work because it had been rejected by the Salon, the French Academy's official exhibiting body. The show attracted widespread hostility. Monet's Impression, Sunrise, a misty view of his native Le Havre at dawn, presided over by the orange ball of a rising sun, was picked out for particular ridicule, and inadvertently gave rise to the name of the group. Only one woman took part-Berthe Morisot, who had also helped organise the exhibition. Her art teacher was alarmed to see her in such 'deleterious company', warning her mother that 'one cannot hope to consort with madmen unscathed'. However, the madmen Impressionists regarded Morisot as one of their own and she would go on to take part in seven out of eight of their group shows, with one critic hailing her work as 'impressionism par excellence'.
Where the male Impressionists celebrated the modern public life of Paris and, sometimes, its seedier sides, Morisot's works explore a private, domestic world. You search her paintings in vain for crowd scenes, bustling boulevards, dance halls filled with revellers or the racier pleasures of life in the French capital, because they would have been out of bounds to an unchaperoned, respectable woman such as her. The women wearing splendid ball gowns in her pictures don't dance, but sit alone in some unspecified interior. Her pictures focus on one, two or three figures, most often family members or maids, relaxing at home or in the garden or park, enjoying games, reading, sewing, nursing and minding children.
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Denne historien er fra March 22, 2023-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
