landscape
8. Eugène Louis Boudin (French, 1824–1898) The Beach at Trouville, circa 1887–96 Oil on canvas, 14 3/8 × 23 in. (36.5 × 58.4 cm) Bequest of Robert B. Woodward, 15.314
Do not dread the grand effects in the sky and on the sea, go after them in their variety and their power without worrying about convention. —Eugène Louis Boudin5 For Boudin, born the son of a mariner in the port city of Honfleur, the seaside remained a powerful source of inspiration throughout his career. His best-known seascapes depict colorful crowds of vacationers strolling on the beaches of fashionable resorts such as Trouville and Deauville on the Normandy coast, enjoying views of the ocean—and each other—beneath bright skies and windswept clouds (fig. 4). Yet Boudin was also attracted to these same beaches when they were largely empty of people. The Beach at Trouville is typical of his minimally populated coastal scenes. The sand is occupied not by a throng of Parisian tourists enjoying a day of leisure, but by a couple of local workers crossing the beach in a wood horse-drawn cart.
Boudin focused his attention in this late seascape on the lone figures enveloped by horizontal expanses of sky, water, and ground, a compositional format that harked back to seventeenth-century Dutch marine paintings. Looking forward, however, was the freshness and immediacy of Boudin’s paint handling, and his commitment to working en plein air to capture the play of light on water and clouds in saturated and unmodulated patches of color. These methods had a profound influence on his younger friend Claude Monet, and demonstrate why Boudin is recognized as an important forerunner of the Impressionists. This painting, and Pierre-Édouard Frère’s The Little Cook (see pl. 17), was part of the bequest of Robert B. Woodward, whose primary collecting interests were Chinese jade and ancient glass. LS
Fig. 4. Eugène Louis Boudin (French, 1824– 1898). Beach of Trouville, 1867. Oil on canvas, 24 13/16 × 35 1/16 in. (63 × 89 cm). The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, P.1985-0001
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Landscape 29
15. Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954) Crossroads at Malabry, circa 1916 Oil on canvas, 24 1/8 × 15 1/8 in. (61.3 × 38.4 cm) Bequest of Laura L. Barnes, 67.24.16 © 2016 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
In a conservative turn from the bold, vivid colors that defined the sun-drenched Mediterranean landscapes of his Fauvist period (1904–6) and the intellectual symbolism of his dalliance with Cubism (1914–16), Henri Matisse focused here on the muted earth tones of a light-dappled forest in the Paris suburb of ChâtenayMalabry. He depicted the forest’s angled trees in long brushstrokes in a limited range of browns. The substantial trunks taper and dematerialize in lightly sketched, ghostly passages at the top. By contrast, Matisse created a hint of sky by daubing a thick, lightly blended mix of blue and white over the branches and foliage. Using a vertical format, he provided a sense of spatial recession, in a nod to Italian Renaissance single-point perspective, with a receding path punctuated by pools of light.
Matisse’s return to a realistic represen tation of nature in large part grew out of his recent reassessment of the landscapes of his predecessors in Paris—namely Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet. Courbet’s depictions of the pools and forest glades of his native Franche-Comté region in eastern France (fig. 11) made a particularly strong impression on Matisse at the height of the Great War. Indeed, Matisse’s painting style was transformed during the war years, especially between 1916 and 1917. At that time he shifted from the modernist idiom of Cubism, which then offended the conservative press, to a more traditional approach to pictorial compositions. RA
Fig. 11. Gustave Courbet (French, 1819–1877). The Edge of the Pool, 1867. Oil on canvas, 31 3/4 × 39 3/8 in. (80.6 × 100 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mrs. Horace O. Havemeyer, Mrs. Frederic B. Pratt, and Hyman Brown, by exchange, 1992.17
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Landscape 41
29. Pierre Bonnard (French, 1867–1947) The Breakfast Room, circa 1925 Oil on canvas, 25 3/4 × 42 1/2 in. (65.4 × 108 cm) Frank L. Babbott Fund, Carll H. de Silver Fund, and A. Augustus Healy Fund, 43.202 © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
A keen observer of the mundane routines of domestic life, Pierre Bonnard simultaneously conveyed intimacy and isolation in the space of this cheerful breakfast room. While the vantage point implies a place for the viewer across from the seated woman, the austere jutting wedge of the white tablecloth and the placement of the basket of fruit set her apart. Moreover, with her head and shoulders bowed over her cup, the woman stirs her drink with meditative self-absorption. Bonnard further underscored the detachment of the figures with the turned back of the retreating child. The theme of the dining room often recurs in the paintings by Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard in the 1890s, but by 1925 the former’s earlier, Japanese-inspired surfaces of flat color patterns gave way to a new interest in structural and psychological possibilities of perspective. While studying law, Bonnard registered at the Académie Julian, where he met Paul Sérusier and Maurice Denis. After receiving his law degree, he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts. He developed his own unique style by 1890, inspired in part by the contemporary paintings of Paul Gauguin and the style and subject matter of Japanese prints. He shared these formal interests with a group of avant-garde painters that included Denis and Vuillard. They called themselves the Nabis, or “Prophets.” By 1894 Bonnard befriended Thadée Natanson, the editor of the avant-garde magazine La revue blanche (see pl. 42), and his wife, Misia, and designed the review’s celebrated poster that year. RA
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Still Life  71
33. William Bouguereau (French, 1825–1905) The Elder Sister, reduction, circa 1864 Oil on panel, 21 7/8 × 17 15/16 in. (55.6 × 45.6 cm) Bequest of William H. Herriman, 21.99
Like Jean-Léon Gérôme (see pl. 18), William Bouguereau was an academic artist of considerable technical skill who enjoyed great success at the Paris Salon. In his early years, he produced the kind of mythological, historical, and religious subjects with morally edifying, didactic themes that were deemed most significant by the French Academy. Encouraged by his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel (who also represented many Impressionist painters, including Berthe Morisot; see pl. 37), Bouguereau later focused on producing sentimental genre scenes such as The Elder Sister. The painting portrays a dreamy young woman, dressed in garments that seem at once rustic and classical, holding her little brother. One of many similar paintings that earned Bouguereau his fortune, it is also the kind of painting that, in execution and sensibility, represented everything that the younger generation of Impressionist painters repudiated. Edgar Degas, for example, disparagingly referred to polished, overfinished painting surfaces as “bouguerated.”1 Although the title defines them as siblings, the pair’s tender, entwined pose, the woman’s serene expression, and the rosary beads the child holds clearly recall images of the Madonna and Child. Indeed, Bouguereau’s composition owes less to everyday life and more to the ancient and Renaissance art he studied in Italy, where he spent several years after winning the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1850. In particular, The Elder Sister suggests a secular version of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna (fig. 16). Bouguereau’s works appealed to a bourgeois clientele—both French and American—that cherished Christian and domestic values, particularly when presented with such untroubled sweetness and delicacy. 80 French Moderns
This reduction is one of at least two known versions that Bouguereau painted after a larger subject displayed in the Salon of 1867. Reductions were smaller-scale replicas that either served as models for engravings or were commissioned by collectors who admired the original painting. William H. Herriman, who bequeathed the painting to the Brooklyn Museum, was a major American collector known to have commissioned versions of existing paintings from DurandRuel, perhaps including this work. LS
Fig. 16. Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino) (Italian, 1483–1520). Sistine Madonna, 1512/13. Oil on canvas, 106 1/8 × 79 1/8 in. (269.5 × 201 cm). Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Gal.-Nr. 93
Portraits and Figures  81
44. Giovanni Boldini (Italian, 1842–1931) Portrait of a Lady, 1912 Oil on canvas, 91 × 47 3/4 in. (231.1 × 121.3 cm) Anonymous gift, 41.876
Giovanni Boldini became one of the most sought-after portraitists in Paris by the end of the nineteenth century. From his fluid, almost abstract strokes of color emerged dazzling images of high-society women wearing fashionable silk gowns embellished with ribbons, bows, and flowers. One sitter’s recollection of Boldini’s personable manner and virtuosity suggests why he was called the Master of Swish: “We didn’t know which was the more amazing, the easy effortless way he had or the swiftness with which the portrait sprang into being.”14 Portrait of a Lady was given to the Brooklyn Museum by the eminent New York City philanthropist George Blumenthal, the first Jewish member of the Board of Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His wife, Florence (born Florence Meyer, 1875–1930), is the glamorous subject. Boldini painted her in Paris, three years after the death of the couple’s only child. To console his griefstricken wife, Blumenthal had taken her to Europe, where they began amassing an important collection of European art. Florence Blumenthal’s upswept black hair and slim, elegant black gown make a striking contrast against her pale skin, and Boldini’s free and cyclonic brushwork is especially evident in the folded pile of fabric behind her. The placement of her stylishly shod feet, her trailing left arm, and the position of her head—tilted slightly upward and turned to the side—suggest a sense of graceful movement, as though she was caught in the moment before walking by, having dropped her cape on the chaise and glanced up flirtatiously to acknowledge her audience. Her pose, the contrast of skin and dress, the bared shoulders and décolletage, and the way the chaise 102 French Moderns
echoes her body’s curves recall those same elements in the scandalous portrait Madame X (fig. 21), by Boldini’s younger friend and contemporary John Singer Sargent. In 1886, in the aftermath of the uproar over Madame X and with the painting still in his possession, Sargent left Paris for good and sold his boulevard de Berthier studio to Boldini. LS
Fig. 21. John Singer Sargent (American, 1856–1925). Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau), 1883–84. Oil on canvas, 82 1/8 × 43 1/4 in. (208.6 × 109.9 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Arthur Hoppock Hearn Fund, 16.53
Portraits and Figures  103
55. Auguste Rodin (French, 1840–1917) She Who Was the Helmet Maker’s Once-Beautiful Wife, 1885–87; cast 1969 Bronze, 19 3/4 × 13 × 9 3/4 in. (50.2 × 33 × 24.8 cm) Gift of the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation, 86.87.2
Like so many of the hundreds of small figures in Auguste Rodin’s masterpiece The Gates of Hell (fig. 27), this sculpture was independently conceived and later inserted into the left basrelief of that large composition, which was inspired by both Dante’s Inferno and Rodin’s own vision of contemporary moral collapse. The sculpture of an old, naked woman with her head lowered as she sits on a rock faithfully represents the effect of age upon the body. Rodin’s keen sense of observation
is evident in the model’s sagging, wrinkled flesh, which defies the era’s conventional standards of ideal beauty. Indeed, even Rodin’s contemporary the sculptor Aristide Maillol was mystified by the master’s choice of subject matter: “An old woman’s belly does not appeal to me: I like health and beauty.”5 The title She Who Was the Helmet Maker’s Once-Beautiful Wife was inspired by a poem by the Renaissance poet François Villon, “Ballade de la Belle Heaulmière aux filles
Fig. 27. Auguste Rodin (French, 1840–1917). The Gates of Hell, modeled 1880–1917; cast 1926–28. Bronze, 20 ft. 10 3/4 in. × 13 ft. 2 in. × 33 3/8 in. (636.9 × 401.3 × 84.8 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rodin Museum. Bequest of Jules E. Mastbaum, 1929, F19297-128
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de joie: Les regrets de la Belle Heaulmière jà parvenue à vieillesse” (circa 1461), which is told by an aged courtesan: “When I think wearily on what I was, of what I am, when I see how changed I am—poor, dried-up, thin— I am enraged! Where is my white forehead— my golden hair—my beautiful shoulders, all in me made for love? This is the end of human beauty!”6 RA
The Nude  127
Index of Catalogue Works
Archipenko, Alexander, The Ray, 67 Boldini, Giovanni, Portrait of a Lady, 103 Bonnard, Pierre, The Breakfast Room, 71 Boudin, Eugène Louis, The Beach at Trouville, 29 Bouguereau, William, The Elder Sister, 81 Breton, Jules, Breton Peasant Woman Holding a Taper, 85; The End of the Working Day, 95 Caillebotte, Gustave, Apple Tree in Bloom, 25 Carpeaux, Jean-Baptiste, Woman of African Descent, 119 Cézanne, Paul, The Village of Gardanne, 27 Chagall, Marc, The Musician, 105 Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille, Ville-d’Avray, 15; The Young Woman of Albano, 87; Young Women of Sparta, 83 Courbet, Gustave, The Wave, 17 Degas, Edgar, Dancer at Rest, Hands Behind Her Back, Right Leg Forward, 123; Nude Woman Drying Herself, 125 Delaunay, Robert, In the Garden, 57 Derain, André, Landscape in Provence, 37 Diaz de la Peña, Narcisse-Virgile, Bathers by a Woodland Stream, 117 Dongen, Kees van, W. S. Davenport, 111 Dufy, Raoul, The Regatta, 39 Fantin-Latour, Henri, Madame Léon Maître, 93 Frère, Pierre-Édouard, The Little Cook, 47 Gérôme, Jean-Léon, The Carpet Merchant of Cairo, 49 Hélion, Jean, Composition, 113 John, Augustus, Woman by a Riverbank, 101 Léger, Fernand, Composition in Red and Blue, 73; Les Plongeurs Polychromes, 135 Lemmen, Georges, Still Life with Fan, 61 Manet, Édouard, Young Girl on a Bench, 91 Masson, André, Glasses and Architectures, 69 Matisse, Henri, Crossroads at Malabry, 41; Flowers, 59; Woman in an Armchair, 109 144 French Moderns
Millet, Jean-François, Shepherd Tending His Flock, 79 Monet, Claude, Rising Tide at Pourville, 21 Morisot, Berthe, Madame Boursier and Her Daughter, 89 Münter, Gabriele, Countryside near Paris, 33; Nightfall in Saint-Cloud, 33 Redon, Odilon, Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, 31 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, Still Life with Blue Cup, 55; The Vineyards at Cagnes, 35 Rippl-Rónai, József, Woman with Three Girls, 63 Rodin, Auguste, The Age of Bronze, 121; Balzac in a Monk’s Habit, 97; Danaid, 129; She Who Was the Helmet Maker’s Once-Beautiful Wife, 127 Rouault, Georges, Still Life with Clown, 75 Sickert, Walter, The Height of the Season, 23 Sisley, Alfred, Flood at Moret, 19 Soutine, Chaim, Still Life, Gladiolas, 65 Tanguy, Yves, Dress of the Morning, 43 Tihanyi, Lajos, The Critic, 107 Vibert, Jehan-Georges, An Embarrassment of Choices (A Difficult Choice), 53 Villon, Jacques, The Philosopher, 133 Vollon, Antoine, Fish, 51 Vuillard, Édouard, Thadée Natanson, 99 Yakovlev, Aleksandr, Model Washing Her Hair, 131