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.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة March 22, 2023 من Country Life UK.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة March 22, 2023 من Country Life UK.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
Put some graphite in your pencil
Once used for daubing sheep, graphite went on to become as valuable as gold and wrote Keswick's place in history. Harry Pearson inhales that freshly sharpened-pencil smell
Dulce et decorum est
Michael Sandle is the Wilfred Owen of art, with his deeply felt sense of the futility of violence. John McEwen traces the career of this extraordinary artist ahead of his 88th birthday
Heaven is a place on earth
For the women of the Bloomsbury group, their country gardens were places of refuge, reflection and inspiration, as well as a means of keeping loved ones close by, discovers Deborah Nicholls-Lee
It's the plants, stupid
I WON my first prize for gardening when I was nine years old at prep school. My grandmother was delighted-it was she who had sent me the seeds of godetia, eschscholtzia and Virginia stock that secured my victory.
Pretty as a picture
The proliferation of honey-coloured stone cottages is part of what makes the Cotswolds so beguiling. Here, we pick some of our favourites currently on the market
How golden was my valley
These four magnificent Cotswold properties enjoy splendid views of hill and dale
The fire within
An occasionally deadly dinner-party addition, this perennial plant would become the first condiment produced by Heinz
Sweet chamomile, good times never seemed so good
Its dainty white flowers add sunshine to the garden and countryside; it will withstand drought and create a sweet-scented lawn that never needs mowing. What's not to love about chamomile
All I need is the air that I breathe
As the 250th anniversary of 'a new pure air' approaches, Cathryn Spence reflects on the 'furious free-thinker' and polymath who discovered oxygen
My art is in the garden
Monet and Turner supplied the colours, Canaletto the structure and Klimt the patterns for the Boodles National Gallery garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show.