Aremarkable new exhibition at the National Gallery takes us back to Paris at the end of the 19th century, but features not a single French artist. Instead, we see the French capital through the eyes of visiting American painters, the most celebrated of whom are James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt.
In the aftermath of the American Civil War, aspiring painters began to flock across the Atlantic to Paris. They came to a place widely thought to be the apogee of European culture. In the year 1880, when the flood was at its height, at least 1,000 Americans went to stay in Paris; surprisingly, around a third were women. Of the 36 artists in this show, six are women, each with her own tale to tell. These are stories of professional success amid the social jungle of an ever- growing, ever-changing, and renewing metropolis, the glamorous likes of which had not yet been glimpsed back home in Tucson.
Paris may well have been a place of architectural and artistic wonder — but it was also feared as a source of dangerous promiscuity, and these women travellers were often warned by their elderly relatives to be on their guard at every turn. “Only remember that you are first of all a Christian — then a Woman and last of all an Artist,” the aunt of the painter Cecilia Beaux wrote to her from back home. Guide books were published for women travellers, advising them on where to lodge, what to eat — in short, how to cope.
Finding places to study was no easy matter for women. Many studios excluded them on the grounds of sex alone, and the École des Beaux-Arts, the premier art school then and now, did not admit women until 1897. What is more, these studios were often uncomfortable, smoky places, with students as close-packed as animals in an abattoir. One painter, Elizabeth Jane Gardner, had the gumption to apply to the Prefecture of Police for permission to dress in men’s clothing to be able to join an all-male drawing class.
The most successful American female painter was the tough and single-minded Mary Stevenson Cassatt from Pittsburgh, and it is her work — paintings, and a range of innovative prints — that is most fully represented in this show. Cassatt is the only painter here who can be confidently described as an American Impressionist. All the others were academic naturalists to some degree — Impressionism played a relatively minor role in the art of Paris at this time. Cassatt, like the great majority of women in this show, came from a privileged background (her brother was president of the Pennsylvania Railroad), and having arrived in Paris, she stayed and stayed. When she was a child, her family had travelled widely in Europe and she spoke fluent French. One of her paintings (not on show on this leg of the tour, though a reproduction is in the catalogue) shows her mother reading Le Figaro at home.
Advertisement
In 1877 Cassatt met, and became a friend and a confidante — though not, as far as we know, a lover — of the tetchy and difficult Edgar Degas. They formed a small, mutual admiration society. Cassatt found Degas’ work overwhelming. “It changed my life. I saw art then as I wanted to see it,” she wrote. Degas felt similarly about the work of Cassatt. “There is a woman who feels things like me,” he commented. Degas invited Cassatt to exhibit with the Impressionist painters, and her work shows much evidence of Impressionist techniques — all those vivid colours and broken, highly expressive brush strokes. But Cassatt was more than just an artist — she also acted, very successfully, as a mediator between French artists and American collectors. It has much to do with her powers of persuasion that some of the greatest American museums have very strong collections of Impressionist paintings.
Cassatt’s paintings show a Paris which is indoors — and this is generally true of all the women painters in this show. It would have been unthinkable for a respectable, unchaperoned middle-class woman to stand in the streets of Paris and paint its grubby cityscapes. So the life of Paris, for Cassatt, was an often brilliant indoors spectacle: society women on full, fashionably tricked-out display in the loge at the theatre, for example, keenly observing one another through opera glasses.
Quite different in her financial circumstances was Elizabeth Nourse, from Ohio, who moved to Paris in 1887 and lived there for the remaining 50 years of her life, in the company of her sister. Nourse, unlike Cassatt and others, was neither affluent nor outgoing, and she favoured domestic themes of a fairly intimate kind — poor people, and rural communities, which she would sketch in the countryside, and then work up back in her Paris studio.
For all her modesty, there was a strong market for her work back home among friends and relatives in Cincinatti, in spite of — or perhaps because of — the fact that from a stylistic and a thematic point of view, she was certainly no risk taker.
As the American community grew in size, so the social and artistic networks began to proliferate. The polished academic painter Elizabeth Jane Gardner was at the centre of the American colony, and she made her home a stopping point for visiting American artists. Gardner, who craved recognition in Europe, won a bronze medal at the Exposition Universelle in 1889, and exhibited annually at the Salon.
Advertisement
Perhaps the painting that best embodies the spirit of most of the women in this show is Ellen Day Hale’s Self-Portrait of 1885. Newly cleaned, this is a brilliant evocation of an independent-minded, self-assured woman and admirer of Manet and Courbet, who was determined to conquer Paris in her own way. She stares at us so unwaveringly, and with such confidence, that we almost know she succeeded.
Americans in Paris 1860-1900, National Gallery, London WC2 (www.nationalgallery.org.uk 020-7747 2885) Feb 22-May 21
Hollywood goes to Paris
The National Gallery is running a film season alongside the exhibition. Watch Gene Kelly on the rooftop with Leslie Caron in An American in Paris (Feb 25), and Jean Seberg stricken over a bleeding Jean-Paul Belmondo in Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (Mar 4). Casablanca (Mar 25), the only film not set in Paris, portrays an idealised view of the city, while François Truffaut’s Tirez sur le Pianiste (Apr 15) flaunts a debt to Hitchcock thrillers. Elsewhere, Le Million (Mar 18) is a dazzling musical comedy that was a huge influence on Charlie Chaplin.
We’ll Always Have Paris (www.nationalgallery.org.uk 0870 9908453), Feb 25-Apr 15
NANCY DURRANT