The Woman Made an Impression: Artist Marie Bracquemond
A Painter of Searchers and Speculators Who Gave in Too Soon
Fruit and flowers were all very charming, but Marie Bracquemond (born Marie Quivoron in France’s Brittany in 1840) didn’t want to paint them. Instead, she populated her outdoor scenes with individuals.
Their searching, speculative expressions betray far more sophistication than she got credit for from the art establishment, then and now.
In 1860, Marie Bracquemond, a promising young student of the celebrated painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, noted, “The severity of Monsieur Ingres frightened me… because he doubted the courage and perseverance of a woman in the field of painting… He would assign to them only the painting of flowers, of fruits, of still lifes, portraits and genre scenes.” — Nicole Myers
Shut Out
In the 1880s, females were shut out of life drawing classes featuring nude models at prestigious academies like the Paris École des Beaux-Arts. So women painters, denied access to the study of human anatomy and classical form, turned increasingly to Impressionism.
Marie Quivoron Bracquemond infused her Impressionism with the precision of a draftsperson, her figures suffused with light and transfixed with dynamic…
