Woman artist

“ Among all the pictures painted by women that I have ever seen, I do not remember anywhere the temperament and individuality of the artist are revealed with greater force. The touch is so primitive, so uncultured in the best and worst sense of the word, that it surprises us to think that it is the work of a woman, half child, who belongs to the best society ”

“ Her dislike to being written about will prevent many interesting particulars in regard to her from becoming known; but, if they ever come to light, they will show her life replete with noble teachings, and that the great painter whose fame will go down to coming ages was as admirable a woman as she was gifted as an artist; that her moral worth was no less transcendent than her genius. ”

“ Michael smiled—a smile of superior knowledge.
"One cannot serve two masters, ma chère. That's where the complication comes in, when an artist happens also to be a woman. The creative force, mental or physical, is a master-force. Only a superhuman vitality can accomplish both with any hope of success. Succumb to your womanhood, and there's an end of your Art—voilà tout." ”

“ The nineteenth century was better for woman than the eighteenth, the eighteenth better than the seventeenth: what could be more significant? In the arts I feel that woman has never had her opportunity. She has been hailed as an executive [Pg 50] artist, actress, singer, pianist; but as a creator, novelist, poet, painter, she has been steadfastly discounted,—told that what she did was very pretty, until she grew unable to do anything but the pretty-pretty. She has grown up in an atmosphere of patronage and roses, deferential, subservient. ”

“ But the way in which most of our first-class artists live, that are prudent and steady in their habits, and possess any business qualifications, contradicts the opinion, quite common, that an artist's life must always be one of self denial and poverty. We think artists fare as well as most people, and we do think it a life very inviting to the young ladies of our country. Those that have the time, the means, and the talents, will find it an absorbing, a fascinating employment. Women succeed best in painting pictures of their own sex, and of children. ”

“ With a nobly equal womanhood, stalwart and athletic; with the high standards of beauty and of decorum which we can never have without free womanhood; we should show a different product in this great art.
An interesting note in passing is this: when we seek to express socially our noblest, ideas, Truth; Justice; Liberty; we use the woman's body as the highest human type. But in doing this, the artist, true to humanity and not biassed by sex, gives us a strong, grand figure, beautiful indeed, but never decorated. ”

“ The artist that instructs them visits the scholars only two or three times a week. The studio is a sort of mutual school, where pupils teach each other; they are of all ages. All conditions of society are represented. Three kinds of painting are done by them—face or portrait, landscape, and flowers. Most of the girls of the higher classes prefer landscape. Female artists compete with men, and wear their hair short. Few women like the physical fatigue of a painter's life. There is not the same play for coquetry in artists, as in singers or actors. ”

“ I am inclined to think the latter by far the greater artist, just as I am inclined to think that in literature rather than in any other form of mental activity will always be found woman’s highest intellectual achievement, for the simple reason that woman’s genius consists in personality, and for the expression of personality words are the only adequate medium. ”

“ Woman [Pg 22] is the type of the ornamental part of our life, and lends to existence the charm which inspires the artist, and furnishes him with an object for effort. Her native unconscious grace and beauty present the models which it is his highest merit to copy faithfully.
A New England divine says, “Woman, like man, wants to make her thought a thing.” “All that belongs to the purely natural,” observes Hippel, “lies within her sphere.” The kind of painting, thus, in which the object is prominent has been most practiced by female artists. ”

“ And here is a being who certainly has more than talent, at once poet and artist in tendency, if not yet fairly developed,—a woman, too;—and genius grafted on womanhood is like to overgrow it and break its stem, as you may see a grafted fruit-tree spreading over the stock which cannot keep pace with its evolution. ”

“ It is the systematic concentration of woman’s energies upon the acquirement of the particular qualities which are to procure her a means of livelihood by procuring her the favour of man that has deprived her, steadily and systematically, of the power of creation and artistic achievement; so much so that the commonly accepted ideals of what is known as a womanly woman are about as compatible with the ideals of an artist as oil is compatible with water. ”

“ It requires great perseverance for a female artist to acquire firmness of execution; she does not possess it to the same extent as man. Some artists are willing merely to copy paintings, paint portraits, and give lessons. The school of landscape painting is one well fitted for young and original talent. Women succeed in painting portraits; also, in painting flowers and fruit; very few have tried historical paintings." Painting is certainly a profitable employment for a lady artist of superior ability, if she can have enough to do. Miss F., New York, established a life school for lady artists. ”

“ They impress one as being more refined in features than some painted in earlier centuries, but one reason may be they are modern women, the type of woman we are accustomed to, and the setting is a bit of nature our eyes are familiar with. They do not invite devotion, they do not arouse mother love, they bring no message of uplift. They speak of the superior technique of the artist, and of the lovely women he secured as models. ”

“ While all who know her admire the artist for her talents, her unceasing energy, and philanthropic exertions, they behold in her the good wife, mother, and friend, and the elegant and accomplished woman, presiding over the social circle. ”

“ But it must be admired as a work of art, not as a miraculous and incredible eye. ... Women, in this important and venerable art, stick too closely to crude representation. They forget that men do not admire the technique, but the result. What they should do is to forget realism for a while, and concentrate their attention upon composition, chiaroscuro and color.
[Pg 240]
4 Woman and the Artist
Much gabble is to be found in the literature of the world upon the function of woman as inspiration, stimulant and agente provocateuse to the creative artist. ”

“ "An artist must be man, woman and demi-god," replied Wharton sternly. ”

“ In spite of isolated women artists in the past, it is not too much to say that this generation is the first to develop the fine arts in women. The result is a flood of feminine art, most of which has very little true art in it ”

“ Music only displays on the grand scale the laws which in less obtrusive form govern the whole æsthetic life of woman. Painting, for instance, dwindles in her hands into the "sketch;" the brown sands in the foreground, the blue wash of the sea, and the dab of rock behind. ”

“ Her art is the all-absorbing interest of her life. It is not without its limitations, but within these limitations the artist has known how to be true to herself. Drawing her inspiration direct from nature, she has held on her independent way, steadily faithful to the gift she possesses of evoking a character in a portrait or of making us feel how the common task, when representative of genuine human effort and touched with the poetry of national tradition, of religion, and of nature, becomes a subject of noble artistic treatment. ”

“ She was a woman, and a painter of women—a painter of women from the woman's point of view that desires the world only to think of woman in her pose as woman, reticent, careful to screen the impulsive, most of all the vexatious, the violent, and the irregular moods of femininity's temperament from the eyes of the passer-by; always eager to show woman dressed for the part, and well dressed. ”

“ Art, built upon this, is just like what the shadow of a beautiful woman is to the woman. One gets tired in these galleries of the classic band, and the classic headdress, and the classic attitude, and the endless repetition of the classic urn, and vase, and lamp, as if nothing else were ever to be made in the world except these things. ”

“ How does it place women in her relation to the arts?
Consider what are the qualities essential to success in any one of the arts. Are not the most essential of these a quick reception of impressions, added to an acute memory for all that has been experienced? The poet and the writer can reach deeper into the nature of others, the architect, the sculptor, the painter can see more clearly, the musician hear more finely; and so it is with all the arts. Does not the genius, or even the man of talent, take his place as one who understands incomparably more than others ”

“ I have heard that some women hold that the mission of their sex extends beyond the boudoir and the nursery. It is certainly not within my province to discuss so important a question, but I think it is clear that all that is best in woman's art is done within the limits I have mentioned. This conclusion is well-nigh forced upon us when we consider what would mean the withdrawal of all that women have done in art. ”

“ And are wanting a great song for Italy free, Let none look at me!
Yet I was a poetess only last year,
And good at my art, for a woman, men said. But this woman, this, who is agonized here,
The east sea and west sea rhyme on in her head Forever instead.
What art can a woman be good at? O, vain!
What art is she good at, but hurting her breast With the milk teeth of babes, and a smile at the pain?
Ah, boys, how you hurt! you were strong as you pressed, And I proud by that test.
What art's for a woman! ”

“ She has acquired knowledge, “read up” literature, and to some extent digested philosophy; but she applies her powers, her culture, and her training—from practice and association with professional writers—to the amplification and rounding off of woman’s art. She established domestic realism by the expression of feminine insight. She is content to leave other things to other pens. The appearance of generalisations not influenced by her sex is misleading. It is only a modern form of the old story. Her heart, and her genius, are those of a woman, womanly. ”

“ Speaking, then, as one of the common herd—the public—I ask myself why it is that as a rule woman's art leaves me cold, woman's literature unconvinced, dissatisfied, and even irritated? And the only answer I can find is that they are artificial; that they are not a representation of life or beauty seen by a woman's eyes, but an attempt to render life or beauty as man desires that a woman should see and render it. ”

“ A painter of unusual strength and grasp of mind and brush, she was emphatically a womanly woman in her home life, in her care and helpfulness to her parents, brothers, and sister, and she had survived them all. ”

“ For the highest achievement in the arts they have missed the concentration, the severe devotion to work, the control of thought and complete self-restraint, which can come only from discipline, from long training, and freedom. Yet I make the claim that woman, from her constitutional femininity, is a compound of all those qualities that genius demands. The channels of woman's energy have been everywhere choked. No great creative art has ever been produced by a subjugated class. ”

“ It persists often in the dress of the most defiant suffragette, in outbreaks of incongruous frivolity, forlorn tawdry roses that still whisper memories of the Pompadour and her triumphant guilty splendour.
But besides all this unconscious feminine influence upon art, there is the influence of women who care consciously for art; and it also has an enervating effect on the artist. For the female patron of art, just because there are so few male patrons of it, is apt to take a motherly interest in the artist. ”

“ Besides a large simplicity of style, there is about her drawing something oddly sympathetic, and what I should call, for want of a better word, amusing; while a sense of the peculiar significance to her of certain forms and relations of forms comes through and gives to her work an air of intimacy that you will get from nothing else in this exhibition. Any woman who can make her work count in the art of her age deserves to be criticized very seriously. ”

“ Never did any woman possess more art without the appearance of art; never was a more fertile head, or superior knowledge of the human heart, and the means of ruling it. She was, however, proud and haughty ”

“ But what do we find?
In painting and sculpture, no women among the best, although considerable numbers among the second best and below. There is no woman Rodin or Meunier or Klinger or Renoir or Picasso. ”

“ No female artist has exceeded this lady as a colorist, and very few artists of the rougher sex have produced portraits so full of character, spirit, and vigour, and that boldness and breadth of light and shadow which constitutes one of the highest triumphs of art. ”