Celebrated, forgotten, perhaps celebrated again: the fates of three female geniuses

Berthe Morisot (1841–95) was at the heart of the impressionist movement. She showed at seven of the famous eight impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886. Together with her husband, Eugène Manet, brother of the more famous Édouard Manet, she hosted a weekly salon; among the regular visitors were Degas, Monet, Renoir and the poet Stéphane Mallarmé. Another great poet, Paul Valéry, her nephew by marriage, wrote introductions to catalogues of her posthumous shows. Édouard Manet, who shared her interest in Fragonard, Watteau and other 18th-century artists, painted 14 portraits of her. In 1896, a year after her death, Degas, Mallarmé and Renoir put on a memorial show of nearly 400 works—about half of her total output and, by far, the largest Morisot exhibition there has ever been.

Male prejudice is, no doubt, partly to blame for her subsequent slide into relative obscurity, but another reason may be more important still. It is, quite simply, difficult to see much of her work; most of it is in private hands. Many of her paintings are of family members—her daughter Julie, her niece Paule Gobillard, and her husband Eugène—and, according to Rachel Cohen, who reviewed a large exhibition of her work held between 2018 and 2019, “Morisot’s descendants have cherished her paintings as both masterpieces and precious heirlooms.” In Paris, the Musée d’Orsay owns 10 oils and the Musée Marmottan Monet owns 25 oils, 75 watercolours and some pastels and drawings. In London, the Tate, the Courtauld and the National Gallery own one oil each. There is one painting in Brussels, one in Stockholm, two in Tokyo, perhaps half a dozen in the Met in New York and a handful in other American museums. This is extraordinarily few.

The exhibition of Morisot’s work now showing in Dulwich focuses on her debt to Fragonard and Watteau, to Reubens and to the English portraitists Reynolds, Gainsborough and George Romney. There is no doubt of the importance of these artists to Morisot; she went out of her way to see their work and wrote admiringly about them in letters to her sister and friends. The exhibition includes interesting juxtapositions of paintings by Morisot and these earlier artists. Morisot’s debt to the past is also emphasised by the wall captions, which display several memorable quotations from contemporary reviews: “Not since Fragonard have such pale colours been applied with such boldness of spirit.” And, “Everything floats, nothing is formulaic […] and there is a finesse similar to Fragonard.”

For all this, the finest paintings in the Dulwich exhibition are a far cry from Fragonard. 

Children at the Basin, for example, shows Julie, aged seven, and another girl fishing for imaginary goldfish in a large blue and white china bowl. Emotionally, the girls seem real and present, yet Julie’s raised right arm, holding two small sticks as if they are weapons, is almost transparent and the lower part of the second girl’s torso dissolves in a translucent wash—thin white paint with bare canvas showing through. The space above this girl’s head is scattered with brilliant zigzags of red, which perhaps hint at the goldfish and vividly convey the girls’ excited, almost violent alertness. Compared with this, portrayals of children by Renoir or any other of her contemporaries appear saccharine.

Morisot often used long brush strokes that extend across figure and background, bringing the two together. Young Girl with a Vase (from 1889, not included in the Dulwich exhibition) is composed of large areas of blank canvas, a chair and a round table sketchily outlined in pencil, and a young woman’s face and torso that are fully painted. The girl gazes attentively towards the viewer; an open book lies in front of her, but she is not looking at it. Her hair is painted with great care, in many different shades of red and brown. The walls, along with the table and her book, are scattered with small stabs, scrawls and swirls of bright blues, gold, pink and white. No other Impressionist took an apparent lack of finish to such an extreme; only in late Monet and Van Gogh is every detail of a painting’s texture so vibrantly alive.

Morisot was as innovative in her subject matter as in her techniques. It was, for example, her paintings of women at their toilette that prompted Degas’s paintings of women bathing. And in her paintings of figures beside windows or on verandas, she pioneered a hybrid genre of landscape, still life and images of women going about their everyday activities. The use of verandas may have been in part a matter of practical convenience, since plein air painting was awkward for a woman and likely to attract unwanted attention, but Morisot’s concern with windows and thresholds and liminal spaces of all kinds also carries psychological meaning. Many of her evocations of children and adolescent girls reading, looking through windows or playing musical instruments are imbued with a sense of wistful expectation. Like Morisot, these young beings are parting with what is safe and familiar in order to explore new worlds.

It may seem churlish to criticise an exhibition that does, at least, allow us to see many fine paintings never before shown in this country. It is, nevertheless, unfortunate that the emphasis on Morisot’s debt to the 18th century reinforces a stereotype of her as a Paris haute bourgeoise with a line in portraying beautiful women in beautiful dresses. It would have been good to see less emphasis on Morisot as the “grand niece of Fragonard” (a legend long mistaken for literal truth) and more emphasis on Morisot as a bold explorer.

Rachel Cohen concludes her review of the 2018 to 2019 travelling exhibition of Morisot’s works with a list of future exhibitions she would like to see. These include a show of Morisot’s landscapes, many of which verge on the abstract, alongside late Monet; a show of Morisot’s later, more overtly emotional work, alongside Edvard Munch; and a show of Morisot’s more decorative work alongside Vuillard, Bonnard and Matisse.

This is well said; and Paul Valéry went further still, suggesting—without using the phrase—that Morisot was a forerunner of conceptual art. In a discussion of similarities between Morisot and Mallarmé, he wrote of “the skill of a brush that scarcely feathers the surface.” He continues, “But that featheriness conveys all: the time, place, and season, the expertise and swiftness it brings, the great gift for seizing on the essential, for reducing matter to a minimum and thus giving the strongest possible impression of an act of mind.”

In 1903, Gwen John went on a walking holiday in France, together with Dorelia McNeill, who later became the mistress of her brother, Augustus John. The two women often slept outside and paid their way by making portrait sketches. They walked from Bordeaux to Toulouse; they had originally hoped to reach Rome. In 1904, John moved to Paris—to remain there for the rest of her life.

Initially, John supported herself through modelling. She became one of Rodin’s favourite models, and this led her into a long, passionate and often painful affair with him. It also brought her close to Rainer Maria Rilke, who was then working as Rodin’s secretary. Both Rodin and Rilke believed in the need to dedicate oneself absolutely to one’s art—a belief that John fully shared.

In 1913, John converted to Catholicism. She became involved with a Dominican community in Meudon and painted portraits of individual nuns and of the community’s founder, Mère Poussepin. She continued, however, to go her own way. When the curé reprimanded her for drawing other worshippers during mass, her close friend Véra Oumançoff told her she should follow his advice. In reply, John wrote, “…my spirit is not able to pray for a long time at a stretch. The orphans with those black hats with white ribbons and their black dresses with little white collars charm me, and the others charm me in church. If I cut off all that there would not be enough happiness in my life.” These seemingly naive words epitomise much that is central to John’s life and work: her independence, her ability to delight in small things, the extent to which, for her, life and art were inseparable.

The exhibition currently on at Pallant House Gallery, in Chichester, includes a wide variety of John’s work: Vermeer-like interiors, still lifes, landscapes and several unsentimental drawings of cats that convincingly evoke their inner springiness and self-sufficiency. Among the many memorable portraits of women are a superb red chalk drawing of Dorelia and the equally fine oil, Dorelia in a Black Dress (both 1903 to 1904). These are juxtaposed with Augustus John’s Portrait of Dorelia (1903). The contrast between the work of the two siblings is striking. Gwen’s Dorelia has an inner life. She appears thoughtful and perhaps slightly amused by something; it is hard to say whether or not there is a smile on her lips. In comparison, Augustus’s Dorelia, in spite of her glowing cheeks and surface vivacity, seems lifeless. Augustus was far better known at the time, but there is no doubt as to who is the greater artist. It is to Augustus’s credit that he once said, “In 50 years’ time I will be known as the brother of Gwen John.”

Gwen herself wrote that she could not imagine “why my vision will have some value in the world – and yet I know it will.” The reason is simple enough: she had her own vision and she stayed loyal to it throughout her life, unswayed by fashion. She is one of the most original British artists of the last century.

A Russian contemporary of John’s, the Russian writer Nadezhda Teffi (1872–1952), provides a more painful example of the difficulty women then faced in combining their art and a family life. In 1898, unhappily married in a small provincial town and probably on the edge of a breakdown, she left her husband and three children and returned to St Petersburg to begin her career as a professional writer. This rupture—which Teffi hardly ever spoke about—was a source of almost unbearable guilt. The words she wrote nearly 50 years later to her elder daughter have the ring of truth. After saying she had been a bad mother, Teffi backtracks: “In essence I was good, but circumstances drove me from home, where, had I remained, I would have perished.”

Morisot, John and Teffi were all well known during their lives. In pre-revolutionary Petersburg, Teffi was a superstar, admired by both Lenin and the tsar, with her picture on candy wrappers. Morisot was considered one of the finest impressionists and even the more introverted John exhibited regularly. It seems that their gifts were such as to be impossible to ignore during their lives; only after their deaths were historians able to relegate them to the sidelines.

All three have also been pigeonholed to an unusual degree—another way of cutting them down to size. This is true of Morisot, whose art has all too often been facilely labelled “feminine”. It is true of John; Alicia Foster—who has both curated the exhibition in Chichester and written an accompanying biography—is the first critic to bring out how deeply this “shy recluse” was involved in the cultural life of her time.

And it is especially true of Teffi. She first won fame for the light satirical sketches she published during the first five years of her career. Despite the bleakness of many of the stories and memoirs she published between 1916 and her death in 1952, she is still commonly thought of as a “light humourist”.

Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism is on display at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, until 10th September; Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris is on at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, until 8th October.