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Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Madame Henriot, c1876, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
Berthe Morisot, Woman and Child In a Meadow at Bougival, 1882, oil on canvas, Davies Collection, National Museum of Wales
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, La Parisienne, oli on canvas, 1874, Davies Collection, National Museum of Wales-Cardiff
Honore Daumier, The Night Walkers, Oil on Board, Davies Collection, National Museum of Wales-Cardiff
Edouard Manet, Effect of Snow Petit-Montrouge, 1870, Oil on Canvas, Davies Collection, National Museum of Wales-Cardiff
Paul Cezanne, The Francois Zola Dam, c1877, Oil on Canvas, Davies Collection, National Museum of Wales-Cardiff
Matthew Smith, Apples On a Wicker Chair, oil on canvas, 1915, Davies Collection, National Museum of Wales-Cardiff
It's my absolute delight to introduce our readers to Jane Librizzi. Her intellectually stimulating and aesthetically astute blog, The Blue Lantern, has captivated and enchanted me for more long mornings, afternoons and evenings than I would care to admit. Originally from northern New Jersey, she lived in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and now lives in upstate New York. She studied the piano for ten years and started writing stories at age nine. Aside from freelance writing, she has worked in music broadcasting on her local Public Radio station for the past nine years. The place in the world she would most like to visit is the Wolong Panda Research Center in China. We asked her to think about this exhibition and the paintings as objects and we are thrilled to be able to share her thoughts....
TURNER TO CEZANNE: MASTERPIECES FROM THE DAVIES COLLECTION NATIONAL MUSEUM WALES
October 9, 2009 –January 3, 2010.
It may come as a surprise that a minor actress of the French vaudeville stage is at the center of a major Impressionist exhibition, but there she is – Henriette Henriot, a wide-eyed young woman, eager to reach out for what the future offered. A frequent model for Pierre-Auguste Renoir in the 1870s, she is the lady in blue of La Parisienne, a portrait that has inspired a new opera production and a one-woman play about her life.
Turner to Cezanne: Masterpieces from the Davies Collection makes the third stop on its American tour in Syracuse, New York, opening October 9 at the Everson Museum. The exhibition has already visited Columbia, South Carolina and Oklahoma City with further engagements at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D. C. and Albuquerque. The Davies collection have never before been seen in the United States. The National Museum of Wales offered these fifty-three works for a North American tour when they would otherwise have been put into storage while major renovations were made to the museum in Cardiff.
Three years of preparation for the Everson Museum included upgrading its heating and ventilation systems and repairs to the roof and skylights, at a cost of $1.3 million. Two years ago the Everson Museum approached Syracuse Opera about a possible collaboration based on images from the Davies collection. The result is a production of Giacomo Puccini’s Parisian love story, La Boheme. For this production, Mimi will be costumed in a replica of the blue dress, created for the Syracuse Opera Company by the Utah Opera’s Rose Brown. Also in production is an original one act play by Lauren Unbekant of Syracuse Stage, Woman In Blue, in another version of the blue dress, this one made in Syracuse by Gretchen Darrow-Crotty.
Born Marie Henriette Alphonsine Grossin in 1867, Henriette was the daughter of a milliner who lived alone in a single room; the father’s name was not recorded on the birth certificate. After study at the Paris Conservatoire and a tour of the provinces, the young actress returned to Paris in 1874, adopting the name Henriette Henriot amd styling herself an “artiste dramatique.” Henriette worked as an artist’s model to pay the rent, becoming one of Renoir’s favorite models and appearing in at least eleven of his paintings during the period 1874-1876. (Renoir’s Madame Henriot (1876) is one of his most familiar works.)
The bright hues of La Parisienne’s dress were made possible by the introduction of chemical fabric dyes and her well-tailored couture was made possible by the sewing machine. The beaches and back-country byways prominently featured in the Impressionist landscape came as revelations, not only as aesthetic experiments, but by revealing how easy it would be to visit in person on the newly laid national railway system blanketing France.
Gwendoline and Margaret Davies were heirs to one of Britain’s great industrial fortunes; they grew up in rural Wales. With much study and preparation, they assembled their art collection between 1908-1922, first loaning it and then giving it to the nation. New research for this exhibition suggests that the influence on their collecting tastes of Hugh Blaker, curator of the Holburne Museum in Bath, has been overrated. The Davies sisters assembled the largest collection of modern French art in Britain, a surprisingly avant-garde one that spanned Realism, Naturalism, and Impressionism, to Pontillism and Fauvism.
The effects of modernism appear everywhere in the exhibition, in Cezanne’s 1877 depiction of a massive engineering project, The Francois Zola Dam shouldering its way into his native Provence.. So controversial was the painting that offers to loan the painting to London’s National Gallery and the Tate in 1918 were both rejected. Their purchase from Durand-Ruel of an oil sketch Effect of Snow At Petit-Montrouge is regarded as Edouard Manet’s first Impressionist wor. It was painted in 1870, while Manet was a member of the National Guard serving in the Franco-Prussian War. (The Petit-Montrouge church was commandeered as a field hospital during the siege of Paris.) Berthe Morisot’s At Bouigval exists somewhere between a landscape and a portrait, enmeshed in a wild overgrowth made possible by modern technqiue, a subversive image of her daughter Julie and nanny Pansie. The Davies sisters also collected Honore Daumier, little known outside France at the time. His uncharacteristically enigmatic Night Walkers, silhouettes a socially mismatched pair staring at the moon. Matthew Smith’s Apples on a Wicker Chair is a surprising Fauvist-style British painting from 1915 a still life full of movement whose colors and brushwork are the real subject; the apples appear ready to whirl off the plate-- Jane Librizzi
For more information please visit: Everson Museum of Art
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