|
|
| DEATHS:
1751 SMIBERT —
1895 Mme. MANET |
| ^
Died on 02 March 1751: John
Smibert (or Smybert), Scottish US painter specialized in
Portraits,
born on 02 April 1688. [Did people think that his first name was Bert because
his mom would proudly say of his paintings: “It's Smybert”?] — The appearance of a professionally trained British painter in the American colonies in 1729 marks a crucial point in the history of US art. Smibert not only imported the skills necessary to convey the impression of substantial, rounded forms in a picture, but his commercial success also inspired others to contemplate careers as painters. Born in Edinburgh and schooled in London and Italy, Smibert attracted numerous clients upon his arrival in Boston. — John Smibert divided his early career between Edinburgh, his birthplace, and London, where he variously studied art, worked as a plasterer, painted houses and coaches, and eventually set up as a portrait painter and copyist. He arrived in Italy in 1717, copied master paintings in Florence and Rome for his patron Cosimo III de' Medici, and then returned to London. By 1722 he had a studio there and was considered a leading portraitist. Smibert arrived in the American colonies in 1728, attracted by climate, opportunity, and the promise of employment in a visionary utopian colony to be established in the Bermudas. It failed to materialize, but he remained, the first fully trained artist in the colonies. He established a highly successful portrait practice in Boston. — LINKS — John Nelson, (1732, 113x91cm) |
| ^
Died on 02 March 1895: Berthe
Marie-Pauline Morisot, Mme. Eugène Manet, French
Impressionist
painter born on 14 January 1841. — Berthe Morisot was a French impressionist painter. Influenced by the artists Camille Corot and Edouard Manet, she gave up her early classical training to pursue an individualistic impressionistic style that became distinctive for its delicacy and subtlety. Her technique, based on large touches of paint applied freely in every direction, give her works a transparent, iridescent quality. She worked both in oil and in watercolor, producing mainly landscapes and scenes of women and children, as in Madame Pontillon Seated on the Grass (1873). — Born into a family of wealth and culture, Morisot received the conventional lessons in drawing and painting. She went firmly against convention, however, in choosing to take these pursuits seriously and make them her life's work. Having studied for a time under Camille Corot, she later began her long friendship with Édouard Manet, who became her brother-in-law in 1874 and was the most important single influence on the development of her style. Unlike most of the other impressionists, who were then intensely engaged in optical experiments with color, Morisot and Manet agreed on a more conservative approach, confining their use of color to a naturalistic framework. Morisot, however, did encourage Manet to adopt the impressionists' high-keyed palette and to abandon the use of black. Her own carefully composed, brightly hued canvases are often studies of women, either out-of-doors or in domestic settings. Morisot and US artist Mary Cassatt are generally considered the most important women painters of the later 19th century. — Berthe Morisot's mother arranged drawing lessons for her three daughters with no other intention than cultivating a polite pastime. That Berthe emerged with professional aspirations must have caused some consternation in their upper-middle-class Parisian household, since it might have compromised her future responsibilities as a wife and mother. Between 1864 and 1868 Morisot exhibited at the Paris Salon. Her early contact with the plein air Barbizon painter Camille Corot and her meeting Edouard Manet, whose work was reviled by both critics and Salon officials, encouraged her to repudiate the Salon system. As a result, she began to follow a more independent path and to exhibit her work with the Impressionists. She married Eugène Manet, Edouard's younger brother in 1874, the year the Impressionists held their first controversial exhibition — her portrait by brother-in-law Manet — LINKS — Au Bois de Boulogne (1888) — Paris vu du Trocadéro (1872) — Cache-cache (1873, 45x55cm) — Nice Little Girl (Nice: the city) — La lecture (1888) _ This is at once a genre scene and a portrait of Jeanne Bonnet. It conveys Morisot's ability to integrate her art and family life by painting canvases of domestic scenes. Although out-of-doors, the space of Reading is shallow, compressed by a balcony railing and foliage. Morisot employed many compositional devices — the bird cage, the railing and chair, the wall casement, and the palm frond that arches over the sitter's head — to enclose the figure. These forms, associated with the nineteenth-century feminine ideal, also picture a woman's space as a closed world turned in on itself. |
site safe for children 