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Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century European Art

<i>Christ and the Samaritan Woman</i>, 1624 or 1626

Abraham Bloemaert (Dutch, 1564-1651)
Christ and the Samaritan Woman, 1624 or 1626
Oil on canvas, 44 x 42 inches
Museum purchase with funds provided by Mr. and Mrs. Wally Bishop in memory of Mrs. John F. Carson 75.5


Bloemaert was the leading landscape and history painter in Utrecht. He also taught other important Dutch painters, including Jan Both and Hendrick Terbrugghen. A significant part of his output included altar pieces for Catholic churches and private chapels for which this painting may have been completed. It depicts the story of Christ meeting with the woman of Samaria from the Gospel of John (4:1-20), a parable of tolerance. While the religious authorities of Jesus's day generally denounced and shunned the Samaritans as heretical, he does not reject this woman. Rather, he extends to her and her compatriots the hand of compassion and possible salvation. Bloemaert infuses the painting with layers of meaning. Jacob's well is not merely a picturesque setting for a meeting of strangers, but a symbol of the sacrament of baptism. The butterfly at Christ's feet represents the transitory nature of human existence. The cross like armature for the well pulley, above Christ's head, provides a tragic foreboding of his future martyrdom.

 

Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun (French, 1755-1842)
Julie Lebrun as Flora, 1799
Oil on canvas, 51 1/4 x 38 3/8 inches
Museum purchase with funds provided by the
Rexford Stead Art Purchase Fund 83.5

Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun's fashionable style combining charm and simplicity made her one of the most popular portrait painters in Paris before she was 20 years old. During a career that spanned more than seventy years, she painted some 800 portraits and documented noted members of the French aristocracy. She made more than thirty portraits alone of Queen Marie Antoinette. A staunch Royalist, Vigee-Lebrun was forced to leave France with her daughter at the outbreak of the French Revolution of 1789.

This monumental portrait of her only child Jeanne Julie Louise at nineteen is considered one of her most important paintings. She completed it in St. Petersburg, Russia, where the family lived in exile from 1795 to 1801. To symbolize her youthful beauty, Vigee-Lebrun portrayed Julie as Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers. Julie's flowing dress and scarf were probably inspired by antique decorative motifs found at recently excavated Pompeii, located near Naples, where the Lebrun's lived sporadically after leaving France.

Julie Lebrun as Flora, 1799

Nineteenth Century European Art

<i>La Lecture</i>, 1888

Berthe Morisot (French, 1841-1895)
La Lecture (Reading), 1888
Oil on canvas, 29 1/4 x 36 1/2 inches
Museum purchase in memory of Margaret Acheson Stuart 81.2

Berthe Morisot's mother arranged drawing lessons for her three daughters with no other intention than cultivating a polite pastime. That Berthe emerged with professional aspirations must have caused some consternation in their upper-middle-class Parisian household, since it might have compromised her future responsibilities as a wife and mother. Between 1864 and 1868 Morisot exhibited at the Paris Salon. Her early contact with the plein air Barbizon painter Camille Corot and her meeting Edouard Manet, whose work was reviled by both critics and Salon officials, encouraged her to repudiate the Salon system. As a result, she began to follow a more independent path and to exhibit her work with the Impressionists. She married Eugene Manet, Edouard's younger brother in 1874, the year the Impressionists held their first controversial exhibition.

Reading is at once a genre scene and a portrait of Jeanne Bonnet. It conveys Morisot's ability to integrate her art and family life by painting canvases of domestic scenes. Although out-of-doors, the space of Reading is shallow, compressed by a balcony railing and foliage. Morisot employed many compositional devices–the bird cage, the railing and chair, the wall casement, and the palm frond that arches over the sitter's head–to enclose the figure. These forms, associated with the nineteenth-century feminine ideal, also picture a woman's space as a closed world turned in on itself.

 

Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926)
Le Parlement, effet de brouillard (Parliament, Effect of Fog), 1904
Oil on canvas, 32 1/2 x 36 1/2 inches
Gift of Charles and Margaret Stevenson Henderson and Friends of Art 79.5

Many critics and art historians consider Monet the supreme Impressionist painter because of his intense interest in and exploration of light and color. Monet first lived in England during the Franco-Prussian War (1869-70). In the fall of 1899 he and his wife visited London, where their son Michel was studying English. During this stay and subsequent extended visits, Monet worked on a series of paintings of Charing Cross Bridge, Waterloo Bridge, and the River Thames.

Parliament, Effect of Fog is one of nineteen recorded paintings of Parliament completed by Monet between 1900 and 1904. The various scenes show the effects of fog at different times of the day, capturing its polychromatic reflections on the Thames. These paintings of London were not so much views of the city through a veil of atmosphere as views of the veil itself, an "envelope," to use the artist's own words.
Parliament, 1904