Reviews
Piero di Cosimo, A Satyr Mourning over
a Nymph. National Gallery. From One Hundred
Details from the National Gallery by
Kenneth Clark.
Also, McGregor had sometimes
changed the size of the detail that Clark
had selected, often with distracting
results. For example, for Ingres’ Madame
Moitessier, Clark had concentrated solely
on the face of the sitter. McGregor, rather
mysteriously, had included a large port-
ion of the flowery dress and brooch,
distracting from the close concentration
on the face. Penny has, in most cases,
restored Clark’s original selection, a dis-
tinct improvement on the McGregor
edition.
This is not a scholarly book. I have
already remarked on the unsatisfactory
nature of Clark’s commentary. Also, there
is neither table of contents nor index,
disconcerting if you wish to find a pair
of images you particularly liked. It is
now hard to see its didactic purpose,
although it could be used as a teaching
aid much in the way that Clark intended.
But I find this a worthwhile re-publication
of Clark’s work, worthwhile for the quality
of the colour images alone. It is an
absorbingly beautiful book. I wish it
every success. I hope that it is successful
enough that the publishers consider re-
publishing Clark’s 1941 More Details from
the National Gallery. In the depth of the
blitz, when all the paintings had been
hidden away in some distant cave in
Wales, all Clark could do was look at
his library of photographs, and to en-
tertain his fellow beleaguered countrymen
and women, providing them with another
fine selection of pairs of images, this time
without the irritating commentary. These,
46 The Art Book volume 16 issue 2 may 2009 r 2009 the authors. journal compilation r 2009 bpl/aah
too, would look wonderful in full digital
splendour.
dennis wardleworth
Independent Scholar, Dorset, UK
WOMEN IMPRESSIONISTS
BERTHE MORISOT, MARY
CASSATT, EVA GONZALES,
MARIE BRACQUEMOND
max hollein (ed.)
Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and Hatje Cantz 2008
d30.00 $60.00
320 pp. 274 col/31 mono illus
isbn 978-3-7757-2079-3
T
his review, as with any review of an
exhibition with accompanying cata-
logue, has two distinct components:
the exhibition and the written text.
Shown first at the Schirn Kunsthalle,
Frankfurt and then at the San Francisco
Legion of Honor Museum, the exhibition
was comprehensive and could even be
described as four retrospectives rolled into
one. Unfortunately, I was unable to see
either. I recognise that for a fair discussion
and analysis of the whole venture I can do
justice to what is ultimately only part of the
project. This is an important point I shall
return to later.
The intent, as Max Hollein, Director of
Schirn Kunsthalle, points out in the Fore-
word of the catalogue, is to shed light on
four women artists – Berthe Morisot
(1841–95), Mary Cassatt (1844–1926), Eva
Gonzales (1847–83) and Marie Bracque-
mond (1841–1916) – whose contributions
to Impressionism have not received the
attention they undoubtedly deserve. Ingrid
Pfeiffer, curator at the Schirn Kunsthalle
sets the stage for the debate that follows
with ‘Impressionism is feminine: On the
reception of Morisot, Cassatt, Gonzalès
and Bracquemond’. She explores how and
why these four women artists – three of
them French, one American – were able to
win acceptance and acclaim as members
of the Impressionist group and also
why some of them were later forgotten.
An exemplary overview, she contextualises
her questions in view of the difficulties,
prejudices, proscriptions and restricted
scope for action with which bourgeois
women of the nineteenth century had to
contend.
Aside from the last essay (on women
and education), five of the following seven
chapters are devoted to Morisot and
Cassatt. The first, on Morisot, by the
doyenne of feminist studies, Linda No-
chlin, is a prime example of revisionist
art history. Reprinted in this catalogue,
her 1980s article analyses ‘Morisot’s Wet
Nurse: The construction of work and
leisure in Impressionist painting’, to argue
in a Marxist vein that it is ‘about the nature
of work, about gender, and about painting
itself’. A turning point in art historical
methodology, the essay may today border
on over-interpretation.
In ‘‘‘Catching a touch of the ephem-
eral’’: Berthe Morisot and Impression-
ism’, Sylvie Patry, curator at the Musèe
d’Orsay, assesses the painter’s contribu-
tion to Impressionism and its subsequent
redefinition in the 1980s and 1990s with an
emphasis on her method of ‘drawing’. A
short essay, it seems to rely too much on
previous scholarship. Current feminist art
historian par excellence and Cassatt scholar,
Griselda Pollock, provides a psychoanaly-
tical interpretation of the adult-child inter-
action in ‘Mary Cassatt: The touch and the

gaze, or Impressionism for thinking peo-
ple’. Her pictorial analysis is persuasive
and compelling.
Pamela Ivinski’s chapter, ‘‘‘So firm and
powerful a hand’’: Mary Cassatt’s techni-
ques and questions of gender’, combines
connoisseurship with gender-inflected
readings of the artist’s work. Though
Cassatt limited herself mainly to images
of women and children, i.e. a typically
female subject often in the domestic
sphere, the artist moved fluently between
aesthetic trends, historical references,
mediums, and above all techniques, thor-
oughly refusing the critics’ reductive
expectations of the woman artist. Hugues
Wilhelm’s contribution of ‘Seven unpub-
lished letters from Mary Cassatt to Berthe
Morisot and her daughter, Julie Manet’ is
new and welcome material.
The essay ‘Expressive red: Eva Gonzalès
and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’ by Marie-
Caroline Sainsaulieu, deals with compara-
tive ‘observations’. In The Milliner (c 1877/
82?) by Gonzalès, the use of red in the
flowers (which will be sewn onto a hat and
then sold) is linked to the notion of work.
‘The picture [thus] is a kind of tribute
to the milliner’s profession’. The writer
then points at the red stockings and the
flying legs of a girl dancer in Toulouse-
Lautrec’s At the Moulin Rouge: The Dance
(1890) arguing that ‘as with Gonzalès the
use of the colour red is associated with the
notion of making a living’. Other com-
parative ‘observations’ on red and facial
make-up that allegedly ‘create a commu-
nity of identity as women and establish a
social caste’ are intended to show, how,
‘despite the enormous disparities in these
two artists’ personalities and lifestyles,
red was for them both an intimate and
a common passion.’ This is indeed a
‘strange’ (author’s word) comparison; it
is above all a form of art history gone awry.
Marie Bracquemond is the least known
of the grandes dames of Impressionism.
She is the newcomer to shows on women
Impressionists. Jean-Paul Bouillon tries
to fill us in on this forgotten painter,
watercolourist and decorator of ceramics,
explaining her need finally to ‘give up’
because of her overly domineering artist
spouse. The text is peppered with refer-
ences to her son’s memoirs of his mother.
Why not refer to some more recent (less
subjective) material from the Selected
Bibliography? This is a disappointing
essay. I like to remember Bracquemond
as the woman who looks at us in her large
r 2009 the authors. journal compilation r 2009 bpl/aah volume 16 issue 2 may 2009 The Art Book 47
oil On the Terrace at Sèvres (1880). A tour de
force example of Impressionism, the self-
portrait appears appropriately in a full-
page reproduction upfront (opposite the
table of contents) as a statement of self-
reflection and defiance.
The concluding essay by Anna Have-
mann, ‘A call to arms: Women artists’
struggle for professional recognition in
the nineteenth-century art world’ does not
raise any new questions but rather re-
hearses what is today a well-covered topic.
As has been said elsewhere, for women
and art the nineteenth century came with
‘affordances and constraints’. It was
possible, as is manifest in this show, to
forge ahead adopting an avant-garde style
and technique. Nonetheless, ‘what’ the
women Impressionists painted remained
ultimately a narrowly circumscribed sub-
ject matter. Not all things are possible at
all times.
Let me return and conclude briefly
on the venture as a whole. This is a ‘first’
in terms of exhibiting the works of
these four Impressionist women in one
show. The essays in the exhibition catalo-
gue cannot make similar claims. Several
rely overly on earlier scholarship and
taken together seem to rehearse what is
today a familiar debate on women artists,
painting in a man’s world. For visitors
and academics alike, the fabulous illustra-
tions in the handsome catalogue will,
however, provide a lasting testimony to the
extraordinary accomplishments of these
artists.
britta c dwyer
Art historian and independent scholar,
Cambridge
FRENCH ART OF THE
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY AT
THE HUNTINGTON
shelley m bennett and carolyn
sargentson (eds)
The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and
Botanical Gardens in association with Yale Uni-
versity Press 2007 d75.00 $125.00
555 pp. 325 col/158 mono illus
isbn 978-0-300-13594-7
S
ituated in an affluent suburb of Los
Angeles, the Huntington Library,
Art Collections and Botanical Gar-
dens is one of the more popular sites in
the metropolitan area. As its long and
winding name indicates, the Huntington
features an extremely heterogeneous array
Reviews
of attractions. Outside the United States,
its art collections are primarily known for
Gainsborough’s Blue Boy and its unique
holdings of British portraiture. Almost
on an equal footing is an exceptional array
of French eighteenth-century art, includ-
ing one of the best groups of Sèvres
porcelain in North America. The entire
group of more than 200 French works in
different media has now for the first time
be extensively studied and published in a
lavishly illustrated volume, edited by Shel-
ley M Bennett and Carolyn Sargentson,
who also contributed to the catalogue.
The core of the French collection was
acquired by railroad magnate Henry Hun-
tington in memory of his wife Arabella,
who had died in 1924. Arabella was a very
important collector in her own right, but
her French art works were given by her
son Archer to the Palace of the Legion
of Honor in San Francisco. Thus, Henry
acquired a new collection within a span of
less than two years (1926–7) in order to
create a memorial to his wife on the
property in San Marino that they had
planned together. Most of the works
passed through the hands of Joseph
Duveen, who suggested them to Hunting-
ton. Today, it seems as much a monument
to Arabella as to the ‘Duveen taste’ which
so greatly shaped American collecting
in the early twentieth century. Shelley
Bennett’s introductory essay tells the fasci-
nating story of the collection and provides
a useful case study in American taste for
French eighteenth-century art, which was
for a long time focused almost exclusively
on the decorative arts rather than on
painting.
Over the last few years, a group of
major specialists in the field, among them
Charissa Bremer-David, Michael Hall and
Jeffrey Weaver, have worked on the
Huntington’s collection and have brought
our knowledge of its objects up to today’s
standards. In itself this is already a major
achievement, which provides much-im-
proved understanding of a major collec-
tion. The material has been arranged by
medium, and important groups of furni-
ture, gilt bronzes and clocks, Sèvres
porcelain, textiles, paintings, snuff boxes
and sculptures feature in the catalogue.
Entries on each group are preceded by an
introduction that links the objects to the
history of the collection. Carolyn Sargent-
son, Colin Bailey and Malcolm Baker were
called on for introductory essays only, and
strayed somewhat further away from the