Impressions

I met a new artist at the Museum yesterday. Berthe Morisot. When I returned home and did a little research on her, and began to scroll through her paintings, I felt a growing sense of guilt. Some of them looked quite familiar and I had assumed they belonged to Mary Cassatt. But they were very much Berthe's.

The more I read of her story, the more I liked her. She and her sister were sent by their father to a girl's school where they learned to “dabble” in art as part of a regimen in becoming 'finished' as a woman of society, whatever that may mean.

But their art teacher seemed a wonderful, forward thinking man - one Joseph Guichard. He would take them to the Louvre in Paris and let them copy paintings for hours to their great delight. Women were not allowed to go there by themselves to do this. And women were certainly not allowed to have formal, professional training in painting, either. Why ever not, is my question. What reasoning could there possibly be behind that arbitrary decision....

Berthe’s sister eventually got married and moved away, painting slowly ebbing from her own life, though she wrote to her sister Berthe, "I am often with you in thought, dear Berthe. I’m in your studio and I like to slip away, if only for a quarter of an hour, to breathe that atmosphere that we shared for many years".

Berthe kept at it. She even had two of her landscape drawings accepted at the exhibition given by the Academie des Beaux-arts in Paris.

Then she met Manet. And Degas. And Cezanne. And Renoir. And Cassatt. And I think she fell in love with their take on the world. This new thing called Impressionism. She began to watch them. To make her way into the outdoors and to wander her home looking for the impressions she found there, because she was not allowed anywhere else by the established Art world.

She bravely chose to join her efforts to the Impressionists' very first, and highly poo poo'd, exhibit - an exhibit that was soundly rejected by the art critics of that day with a caustic critique: "During Morisot's 1874 exhibition with the Impressionists, such as Monet and Manet, the paper Le Figaro’s critic Albert Wolff noted that the Impressionists consisted of "five or six lunatics of which one is a woman...[whose] feminine grace is maintained amid the outpourings of a delirious mind." Haha. One wonders what she thought of that.

But she had found her "people" and she became truly an Impressionist painter. It made me think. What a wonderful medium Impressionism gives in which to show the world what women see, and what women feel and find important in the world around them; to have it recognized as something truly unique and wonderful and deep and true and intelligent by … men.

I am not an "I am woman, hear me roar" type person. I think most liberated women make the mistake of wanting to BE men - a kind of man envy. I have never, ever wanted to be a man, God bless 'em. I love men very much and I love talking to them because they think differently than I do and they teach me different perspectives. But I am content to be a woman with all the unique qualities that entails. I have been blessed throughout my life to be treated with respect and equality by my Dad, my brothers, my tutors in college and my dear friends who are men. I have been fortunate in this, I suppose.

I think Berthe was one who had to fight for her respect. But she found it in the end. And she did not become manly. She remained quite womanly and saw things men do not see all the time - and perhaps got them to see and love it. She had the unique call to show the world what women DO think and feel. To be counted as equal - not in sameness, but in dignity and beauty.

I would like the world to be quite silent on the topic of the man/woman competition. I would like it so very much if we just saw each other as intelligent human beings made beautiful by God. The growing "woke" trend to flood Universities with all women teachers. To only promote women authors, scientists and engineers - in some guilty, politically correct way is just another form of condescension, I think. It offends me. I think men and women need to mix it up in those fields and may the BEST minds win regardless of sex.

Let everyone be seen for who they are. If they excel, let them be praised. If they be intelligent, let them be heard. If they be good in the public square, let them stand there. If they be artists, let their work be understood as what it is. Woman or Man. Let men respect women, let women respect men. It doesn't seem that hard to me.

We would get better perspective I think. And honestly, I am not 'roaring'. It is only a thought I had today when thinking about Berthe Morisot.

I do not feel inclined at this time to have a paid substack. But if we were together in a cafe discussing all these thoughts, I would not be opposed to you buying me a cup of coffee - with cream, of course. In that spirit, if any of my posts resonate with you and you feel so inclined, you can donate here: buymeacoffee.com/denise_trull