~ Women Impressionists, Harriet Backer ~

Harriet Backer (1845–1932) was a Norwegian painter was a pioneer among female artists in the Nordic countries

She attended Wilhemine Autentrieth Girls' School and Hartvig Nissen School. At 12, she first took lessons in drawing and painting, notably with Joachim Calmeyer. She studied with art instructor Johan Fredrik Eckersberg, in Berlin with Alphons Holländer, with artist Christen Brun and attended the painting school of Knud Bergslien. Later, she was a student of Eilif Peterssen in Munich. She was a student of Léon Bonnat and Jean-Léon Gérôme in Paris. She also spent a summer in the town of Rochefort-en-Terre in Morbihan painting with Léon Germain Pelouse, whom she called "the most natural man I have ever met."

Additionally, Backer traveled extensively as a companion to her sister, concert pianist Agathe Backer Grøndahl, throughout Europe. She took further lessons in the course of these trips. From 1880 to 1888, she stayed in Paris where she shared a studio with fellow Norwegian artist, Kitty Lange Kielland. She was also associated with Salon Marie Trélat in Paris.

In 1888, Backer moved back to Norway permanently. From 1889 until 1912, she operated an art school and was an influence on a number of younger artists. Backer produced just around 180 works of art mostly based upon local themes. She never belonged to any school but worked in the tradition of realism in painting, where she is regarded as both a naturalist and an early Impressionist.

She won a silver medal at the Exposition Universelle (1889). Backer exhibited her work at the Palace of Fine Arts at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois. She received the King's Medal of Merit in Gold in 1908. In 1925, she was made a Knight 1st class in the Order of St. Olav.

Painting : Blue Interior

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~ Women Impressionists, Helene Schjerfbeck ~

Helene Schjerfbeck (1862–1946) was a Finnish painter.

A modernist painter, she is known for her realist works and self-portraits, and also for her landscapes and still lifes. Throughout her long life, her work changed dramatically beginning with French-influenced realism and plein air painting. It gradually evolved towards portraits and still life paintings.

At the beginning of her career she often produced historical paintings. Historical paintings were usually the realm of male painters, as was the experimentation with modern influences and French radical naturalism. As a result, her works produced mostly in the 1880s did not receive a favorable reception until later in her life.

Painting : Girl with a Madonna

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~ Women Impressionists, Lilla Cabot Perry ~

Lilla Cabot Perry (1848—1933) was an American artist who was a major promoter of Impressionism in the United States.

In 1874 she married Thomas Sergeant Perry, a professor at Harvard University. The couple had three daughters, who would become frequent models for their mother’s paintings. The Perry home became an intellectual salon for such writers as Henry James and William Dean Howells and for Lilla Perry’s brother-in-law, artist John La Farge. It may have been the latter who urged her to study painting. Starting with private lessons in 1886, she attended the Cowles School of Art in Boston. She and her family traveled to Paris in June 1867. On this trip abroad Perry studied at the Académie Julian and at the Académie Colarossi with the English painter Alfred Stevens.

The most important influence on her artistic development, however, came from her relationship with the Impressionist painter Claude Monet. For many years the Perry family summered in Giverny, France, near Monet’s home, and he became a friend and mentor to Perry. Monet suggested that Perry commit her first impression of a scene to canvas rather than to a sketchbook. Through such lessons Perry mastered Impressionist techniques. After returning to Boston with one of Monet’s images of Etretat, France, Perry encouraged American interest in him and the other Impressionists by urging her friends to purchase Monet’s paintings.

From 1893 to 1901, Perry lived in Tokyo where her husband taught English literature. During this period she painted more than 80 pictures of Japanese scenes, incorporating Japanese painting techniques into her work. Like other Impressionists, she found subjects for her painting both in landscapes and in ordinary daily activities.

Painting : Lady with a Bowl of Violets

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~ Women Impressionists, Catherine Breslau ~

Catherine Breslau (1856–1927) was a German-born Swiss painter, who learned drawing to pass the time while bedridden with chronic asthma.

After her father's death, Breslau was sent to a convent near Lake Constance in hopes of alleviating her chronic asthma. It is believed that during her long stays at the convent her artistic talents were awakened. In the late 19th century young bourgeois ladies were expected to be educated in the domestic arts including drawing and playing the piano. Pursuing a career was quite unusual and often prohibited. By 1874, after having taken drawing lessons from a local Swiss artist, Eduard Pfyffer, Breslau knew that she would have to leave Switzerland if she wanted to realize her dream of seriously studying art. One of the few places available for young women to study was at the Académie Julian in Paris.

At the Académie, Breslau soon gained the attention of its highly regarded instructors and the jealousy of some of her classmates. In 1879, with a portrait, Breslau was the only student from the Académie Julian women's atelier to debut at the Paris Salon. It was a self -portrait that included her two friends. Shortly afterwards Breslau opened her own atelier, and was becoming a regular contributor and medal winner at the annual Salon. Due to her success at the Salon and favorable notice from the critics, Breslau received numerous commissions from wealthy Parisians. She joined the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1890. She eventually became the third woman artist, and the first foreign woman artist to be bestowed France's Legion of Honor award.

Painting : La Toilette

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~ Women Impressionists, Marie Bracquemond ~

Marie Bracquemond (1840–1916) was a French Impressionist artist. She was one of four notable women in the Impressionist movement, along with Mary Cassatt (1844-1926), Berthe Morisot (1841-1895), and Eva Gonzalès (1847-1883).

Bracquemond studied drawing as a child and began showing her work at the Paris Salon when she was still an adolescent. She never underwent formal art training, she received limited instruction from Ingres which contributed to her stylistic approach.

She married noted printmaker Félix Bracquemond, who helped popularize Japanese art in France. Together, they produced ceramic art for Haviland & Co., a manufacturer of Limoges porcelain. Marie's frequent omission from books on artists is sometimes attributed to the efforts of her husband. Although Félix participated with the Impressionist exhibitions, he notably disapproved of the movement at which his wife excelled. Indeed, Pierre Bracquemond, their son, stated that his father was jealous of Marie's work, belittled her ambition, and refused to show her paintings to visitors.

Marie participated in three out of the eight major Impressionist exhibitions. During her lifetime as an artist, Bracquemond produced at least 157 original works, of which only 31 have been located and cataloged in existing collections today, with the rest having disappeared into various private collections without record.

Painting : On the Terrace at Sèvres

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~ Women Impressionists, Eva Gonzales ~

Eva Gonzalès (1849—1883) was a French painter known for her depictions of contemporary Parisian life and an aesthetic that reflects the strong influence of her mentor, Édouard Manet.

Gonzalès was raised in a cultured bourgeois home by her father, a writer, and her mother, a musician. In 1866, at age 16, Eva began taking art lessons with portraitist Charles Chaplin. Three years later she met Manet and soon became his model and then his student. At the 1870 Paris Salon she exhibited her work for the first time.

Gonzalès’s work faced criticism because of what audiences and critics claimed were overt similarities to the style of Manet, which, at that time, was considered somewhat crude. Her painting A Loge at the Théâtre des Italiens (1874), in particular, drew that comparison. The composition features a man and woman (modeled by Gonzalès’s sister Jeanne with engraver Henri Guérard, whom Eva later married) in a lush box at the opera. Her depiction of the figures with very pale skin set against a dark background recalled Manet’s portraits. Furthermore, a bouquet of flowers placed in the lower left-hand corner mimics the bouquet in Manet’s infamous Olympia (1863) painting, a reference that did not escape viewers of Gonzalès’s painting.

Gonzalès married Guérard in 1879. Before dying in childbirth at age 34, Gonzalès showed her work at a number of important group shows. After she died, Guérard, her father, and a family friend organized a memorial retrospective of 88 of her works. The many works that did not sell at that exhibition were then put up for auction and thus dispersed. In the late 20th century, though there were many fewer works to show for her short career, her reputation grew beyond her association with Manet to join that of Cassatt and Morisot.

Painting : A Loge at the Théâtre des Italiens

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