The Enduring Allure of Small Artworks

As that time of year nears when many arts organizations host shows and sales of small artworks, it is interesting and timely to consider the historical tastes for little pieces of art. While the impending holiday season might bring exhibitions of smaller sized works to venues across the country, collectors have prized small art for centuries and the trends in modestly sized artworks have shaped art history more generally as well. Highlights from the history of art can serve as inspiration for contemporary patrons to add intimately scaled artworks to their collections.

Unknown maker, Right Half of a Diptych: Crucifixion of Christ, French, c. mid1300’s, carved ivory, 10.5 x 7.3 cm (4 1/8 x 2 7/8 in.), Collection of the Worcester Art Museum

In the medieval period, art patrons were high status nobles whose lives were consequently nomadic. Travel between varying estates or to the court meant that precious works had to be mobile. Some of the most treasured artworks of the middle ages were tapestries that could be rolled and taken away. Because small objects are particularly easy to move, an entire industry sprung up around the creation of things like minute ivories that acted as tiny altars for personal Christian devotions.

France become a central location for the production of these sacred objects. Diptychs and triptychs were produced and filled with exquisitely detailed scenes from the lives of the Virgin Mary or Jesus Christ. Originally richly colored with polychrome, most medieval ivories were denuded over the centuries and now exist primarily as sculptural objects and testimonies of religious faith and artistry. For those looking to learn more about this tradition of these small ivory reliefs, the Courtauld Institute’s Gothic Ivories Project is a remarkable storehouse for research and photography.

While little ivories were exceptionally popular, the medieval world was full of small but precious things like remarkable jewelry, works of decorative arts, and tiny books of hours packed with intricate illustrations. All of these objects enable historians to get a picture of social and economic realities for those who commissioned and treasured them.

John Singleton Copley, Self-Portrait Miniature, watercolor on ivory, 1769, 1 3/8 x 1 1/8 in. (3.3 x 2.7 cm), Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Later, in the eighteenth century, another form of small art rose in stature. Items like miniature portraits and highly detailed snuff boxes came into vogue. Pieces like these were also manufactured for the upper echelon of society and were often given as love tokens or other gifts. Although small in scale, they are wonderfully illustrative and help to form a vivid picture of the social world of their time.

In a small self portrait in the collection of the Met, American artist John Singleton Copley captures his own likeness in the tiniest way. Undeterred by the small size of his ivory canvas, Copley created an image of himself that captures his fine clothes and well-coifed hair. Rosy subtleties play across his otherwise alabaster skin and the effects of light and shadow are explored in ways that are as in depth here as they might be in a larger scale work.

While miniatures like Copley’s were particularly popular in his day, there is a long tradition of their production. A detailed catalogue focused on earlier works of miniature portraiture in Europe is available via the Metropolitan Museum online.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington DC has an engaging display of small panels by Georges Seurat.
Photographed by Michael Rose, summer of 2023.

In the nineteenth century, forms of art-making shifted and became more democratized. New technologies allowed for the manufacture of novel artistic materials and artists broke out of their studios to paint en plein air. Confined by what they could carry and by what would remain stable on an easel outdoors, canvas sizes were often reduced and small panels were fodder for sketches that were as masterful and boundary-breaking as the finished works that succeeded them.

At the National Gallery in Washington DC, a case filled with panels featuring studies by the French Post-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat reads like the wall of a contemporary small works show. The wood panels in the series measure at an average of ten inches or less on their long side but are filled with the same enticing Pointillist sensibility as Seurat’s completed paintings like his famed A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grand Jatte. Together, the collection illustrates the artist’s working process and the ways in which large and complex compositions could be developed in smaller bites across multiple panels.

Image of Dororhy and Herbert Vogel alongside work from their growing collection of small art in the 1960’s.
Image by Bernard Gotfryd via Wikipedia images.

Modernity has not ebbed the love for small art. The extraordinary story of collectors Herb and Dorothy Vogel is evidence of this. Throughout the mid and late twentieth century the Vogels became important collectors of some of the most significant artists of their time. Although both had blue collar jobs, they were able to amass an important collection by focusing on small works by big names including the likes of Lynda Benglis, Lois Dodd, Sol Lewitt, Robert Mangold, and Elizabeth Murray. Their sizable holdings eventually took over their modest apartment in New York and they became the subject of a PBS documentary. Much of their remarkable collection was then distributed to museums in all fifty states, making for an enormous impact in small doses.

Whether it be a devotional ivory, a tiny portrait, a nineteenth century painting, or a work of breathtaking modernism, smaller works of art have always appealed to collectors. Today, in an age of the big, the bold, and the expensive, small works exhibitions provide an outlet for artists to create work they are passionate about in a format that is often more accessible to collectors in terms of both the wall space and money required to add such a work to their holdings.

As the season of small works sales gets underway, individuals hoping to support artists in their communities might consider the proud history of collecting modest works as inspiration to buy wonderful little artworks for their own collections.

Mabel Dwight's American Scene

Looking back at American art in the twentieth century, some of the most valuable visual resources are those produced by printmakers. From the urban explorations of John Sloan or Edward Hopper to the more nuanced and human-focused prints of artists like Elizabeth Catlett or Sister Corita Kent, printmaking experienced something of a long golden age. Mabel Dwight is a seminal figure of the American printmaking scene, and an artist whose works are full of trenchant observations of American life. In looking at just four examples of her work, one can find insights into Dwight’s perceptive views of her time and place through the eyes of an artist.

In a 1936 lithograph, titled Ninth Avenue Church, Dwight’s wry sense of humor is on display. A white church stands in the middle of the frame, with the rising city behind and a park in the foreground. What might be a bucolic scene of a New England town common is disrupted by an elevated rail line that brings a train car rattling across the center of the image, obliterating the view of the church’s charming steeple. One imagines what the scene looked like before progress brought train tracks. The image has an auditory quality too. The church bells chiming, the murmurous chatter of park goers, and the clatter that fills any urban space. Other works throughout Dwight’s production lean heavier into the funny. Quotidien images of nuns in libraries or fish in aquariums or audiences in movie theatres are transformed into delightful narrative forays.

Mabel Dwight, Ninth Ave. Church, 1936, lithograph on paper mounted on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the Evander Childs High School, Bronx, New York through the General Services Administration, 1975.83.46

Dwight’s sensibility for people is another through line in her prints. In her Summer Evening, a lithograph from around 1945, a group of figures gather on a street corner lit by a singular streetlamp. The light source dangles to the side of a tilting telephone pole whose wires bleed into the dark skyscape. Under the glare below, men sit on a stoop and characters chat, presumably in the cool air of early night. The image picks up on a tradition of narrative evident in other prints, perhaps most famously in Edward Hopper or Martin Lewis. Where Lewis or Hopper may have shown the scene from above, Dwight brings the viewer eye to eye with the people on the ground. For her the corner represents a nexus of community life and conversation and connectedness. Many of her artworks are ultimately about people and the lives they lead.

Mabel Dwight, Summer Evening, ca. 1945, lithograph on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Frank McClure, 1979.98.74

As much as examinations of the American scene or Americans themselves, though, Dwight was also an extremely active artist who ran in the bohemian circles shaping the nation’s art during an exciting time. In a number of images throughout her oeuvre she examines what it means to be an artist. In her Life Class, from 1931, she shows a group of students at the Whitney Studio Club drawing from a nude model. While any art student will recognize the context of the image, Dwight also captures an art historical moment. Edward Hopper and other luminaries, which Dwight counted among her peers, are present. The image is about the art of making art and it makes one want to pick up a pad and pencil.

Mabel Dwight, Life Class, lithograph, 1931, via Swann Auction Galleries

One of Dwight’s most poignant images turns from the busy excitement of a group life class to the more solitudinous feeling of the studio. Executed in the same year as Life Class, Dwight’s Night Work probes the more solitary aspects of the art practice. Possibly a Greenwich Village scene, the image captures a sort of rear window view through the grand open windows of a neighboring studio across the way. As the hazy moon shines through the clouds above, a lamp illuminates the artist’s drawing board. The scene tells both the story of bustling urban life in the early decades of the century, but also frames the artist’s experience as one that is fundamentally a lone journey in making things.

Mabel Dwight, Night Work, lithograph, 1931, via Swann Auction Galleries

Mabel Dwight’s work is well respected in print circles and held in numerous collections including those of the Smithsonian, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and others. Her prints also appear regularly at the market and at a variety of price points. Looking at just these few examples of her work, one can appreciate Dwight’s remarkable eye and her singular contributions to the epic world of printmaking in the United States of the last century.

Seurat’s Circus and the Spectacle of Pointillism

Nineteenth century France was a time and place full of excitement around new modes of art making. Of the avant garde schools that took shape in this moment, the Impressionists are the best known and most widely revered. Defined by Monet’s sensuous treatment of subjects ranging from cathedrals to haystacks, the appeal of the Impressionists is hard to escape. Other contemporary movements, such as the Pointillists, sought to broker new ways of seeing as well, and with dazzling effects. Georges Seurat’s Circus Sideshow is a signature product of the thrilling nineteenth century and shows off the spectacle inherent in the Pointillist mode.

The Pointillists, led in large part by Seurat, aimed to dissolve the picture plane into innumerable inflections of paint. The eyes of viewers would reassemble these dots, completing the intended image in the heads of onlookers. Based on a novel and sophisticated understanding of optics, the works produced by the Pointillists have a scintillating quality that is unlike the works produced by their earlier counterparts. While Monet’s paintings might make one marvel at light or atmosphere, Seurat’s hinge on something more complex. They make the viewer consider how a picture is constructed, diffused, received, and absorbed.

Seurat’s Circus Sideshow, now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum, leverages the stylistic flourishes of Pointillism to underscore the showmanship of its subject. Musicians are seen playing under gaslight and over the heads of a crowd eagerly hoping to gain admittance to a circus proper. The hum of the gathered group seems implicit in the daubs of paint spread across the surface of Seurat’s canvas. It is a painting about the buzz of a public event, and that exciting atmosphere is perfectly attuned to Seurat’s technique. Each dot of paint can be read as a warbling note of sound, or as the glint of twilight, or as a dash of the vibration of the rowdy mob.

Georges Seurat, Circus Sideshow (Parade du Cirque), 1887-1887, on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The image was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1888. In displaying this vivid nocturne, Seurat was playing a bit of a game with his audience. Like a circus, French salons of all types were about showmanship. Paintings were designed to stop the crowd, to draw them in, to rile them up. Seurat’s image is no different. Its stylistic treatment, novel when it was painted, is still surprising and exciting today. Looking at the painting, one gains a sense of atmospheric dramatism that surpasses many comparable works of the Impressionists. Seurat’s Pointillists sought to build upon the groundbreaking works of the likes of Monet, whose famed Impression Sunrise was completed sixteen years prior to Seurat’s engaging Sideshow.

The event at the heart of Seurat’s grand painting was a proceeding designed to entice passersby to become customers. Through showmanship, this tertiary scene was supposed to turn viewers into ticket-buyers and bring them under the big tent. It was about allure. In this way, the sideshow and Pointillism overlap. They are both full of eye-catching spectacle.

Pointillism was designed to catch, and hold, and entrance the eye. The effect remains and even today Pointillist works bring the viewer back again and again.

Seurat’s interest in circus imagery was deep and the motif appears a number of times throughout his oeuvre. The Met’s Circus Sideshow is one of his largest and most stunning artworks and one that easily defines the movement. It, like the evening it depicts, is a grandiose and exciting extravaganza.

By looking at Circus Sideshow, viewers become both onlookers of art and participants in a public spectacle. They might be dazzled by Seurat’s composition, or by his palette, or by the Pointillist technique. They also become the crowd, like the one the artist captured, waiting in line for a chance to get a closer look at the show.

A detail from Seurat’s Circus Sideshow

In New Bedford, a Rare and Wonderful Exhibition of Albert Pinkham Ryder

Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847 - 1917), may not be a household name but his contributions to American art are significant. An exhibition on view through October in the artist’s birthplace of New Bedford, Massachusetts, explores his art in its own right as well as within the context of modernist movements that came in his wake. Mounted by the New Bedford Whaling Museum, the show is a rare and wonderful opportunity to see many of Ryder’s paintings in one place. A Wild Note of Longing: Albert Pinkham Ryder and a Century of American Art is a must-see exhibition which will reshape perceptions of American art history.

One of the most exciting elements of the show is that it gathers together many of the artist’s paintings in one exhibition. This is the first significant display of Ryder’s work since a 1990 retrospective at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. Some of the paintings on view are indeed on loan from the same institution and give viewers the opportunity to explore works that they might otherwise have to travel to Washington, D.C. to experience. Other artworks come from major institutions like the Metropolitan Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Phillips Collection, making this a mini-blockbuster exhibition.

A quote from Ryder illustrates his independent sensibilities alongside his paintings.

Seeing Ryder’s work in his hometown rather than in New York or the nation’s capital is part of the thrill of this show. Not far from the Whaling Museum’s galleries, the sights and sounds of this historic maritime city are reminders of some of Ryder’s inspirations. Bells are heard from nearby trawlers and seagulls fly low overhead. New Bedford’s bustling port is one of the busiest and most lucrative in the country. In Ryder’s day it was a similarly busy place and the realities of seafaring play into the aesthetic and philosophy of his art.

Ryder’s work is not easily classified but many of his treatments of land and sea bear markings most readily associated with the Tonalist school which heavily influenced American art in the late nineteenth century. Inspired by European counterparts, such artists often sought to create poetic and romantic imagery defined by particularly moody palettes. Where Ryder’s work often differs from his contemporaries is in brushwork, composition, and the sheer expressive energy of his scenes. Ryder’s paintings give viewers a sense of the raw power of the sea, the glittering beauty of atmosphere, and the possibilities of historical or mythological narratives. 

A painting by Wolf Kahn (1927 - 2020) forms an interesting contrast to an earlier piece by Ryder.

The exhibition does not feature Ryder alone, though. The show pairs a wonderful range of the title artist’s paintings with works by later makers who similarly broke boundaries and reconsidered the potential of expression. Works by artists such as Jackson Pollock, Marsden Hartley, Wolf Kahn, and Richard Pousette-Dart form a fascinating pendant to the excellent selection of paintings on view by Ryder.

While Ryder was born in New Bedford, he spent a good portion of his adult life in New York before returning to his hometown at the time of his death. He was an unusual and often lone individual who cuts something of a melancholic figure. While his painterly contributions may not be fully appreciated by a broad audience, this exhibition is an important step in bringing viewers a more complete picture of American art. Ryder’s paintings are beautiful and mournful and provoke emotional reactions as well as appreciation for his remarkable handling of paint. He is, in short, one of the great American artists of any generation and this exhibition is a fantastic chance to learn more about him and his incredible impact.

A Wild Note of Longing: Albert Pinkham Ryder and a Century of American Art is on view at the New Bedford Whaling Museum through October 31, 2021. For full details and information on planning your visit, go to www.whalingmuseum.org.

An Artful Perch Remade at the Providence Athenaeum

The nineteenth century in America was a notable boom time for the visual arts in the United States. Between the end of the American Civil War and 1900, many of the nation’s most notable arts institutions were founded, including Yale’s School of Art, the Metropolitan Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Pennsylvania Academy, to name a few. Americans were, more or less en masse, taking hold of their own cultural aspirations. They developed their own schools in which to study art and museums in which to showcase their growing collections. In Providence, Rhode Island, the arty excitement of the moment was borne out too. In 1877 the Rhode Island School of Design was founded, in 1880 the Providence Art Club followed, and in the mid 1890s the established Providence Athenaeum added a new space dedicated to the visual arts. Recently, the Athenaeum’s Art Room was remade in glorious style. The result is a delightfully artful enclave within a bookworm’s paradise.

The Athenaeum is one of the region’s cultural gems. Founded in 1836, it draws on a heritage of book lovers that can be traced as far back as 1753 when one of its predecessor organizations, The Providence Library Company, was established. A members’ lending library with a populist appeal, the Athenaeum is housed in a stoic temple designed by William Strickland and sited gracefully on the brow of College Hill. The building, which has the look of an ancient vault of knowledge, was opened in 1838. A stone's throw from Brown University and RISD, the Athenaeum is not only the reserve of bibliophiles, but counts among its membership and its wider fanbase people of diverse backgrounds. These days it isn’t uncommon to find an Instagram influencer making a pitstop in the library’s hallowed carrels.

The stately facade of the Athenaeum on a late spring afternoon. A banner with the Rhode Island state motto “Hope” is strung between the doric columns that flank the main entry.

Recently, Athenaeum Director of Collections and Library services Kate Wodehouse generously offered to host me for a visit to the library’s refurbished Art Room. On a bright afternoon I made the five minute walk from my office at the Providence Art Club to our neighboring organization to take Kate up on her collegial hospitality. Located on Benefit Street, itself lined with an unparalleled collection of homes dating to the eighteenth century, the Athenaeum’s crisp and stoney grey facade is set off against the verdant foliage of late spring in New England. Upon my arrival Kate quickly whisked me through the library’s warren of stacks to the uppermost room of the building. Ushered through an unassuming door, one finds a glimpse of the enthusiasm for art that abounded just prior to the turn of the century.

Created in 1896, the Art Room was to be both a place of studious solitude, as well as a latter day cabinet of curiosities. It is tucked away just behind the revival pediment of the Athenaeum’s facade and is accessed from the library’s distinctive and cozy mezzanines. At the entrance one is greeted by a bust of the Providence-born art critic Albert J. Jones, who famously left the bequest that resulted in the foundation of the neighboring RISD Museum. This was to be another hallmark moment in the advancement of art in the city during the period. Just outside the entry to the Art Room the careful observer will also find a fantastic diminutive nocturne of the Athenaeum painted by printmaker Eliza Gardiner hung discreetly under a sconce.

Entering the Art Room from this curated landing, one finds a space that has received a top-to-bottom restoration. Refreshed in new tones, a lush green canopy of a ceiling overhangs the space, where paintings and busts from the Athenaeum’s collection are displayed together in artful repose. Here, portraits of the likes of Edgar Allan Poe surmount shelves filled with texts on art of all kinds. A window in the space looks out on the library’s photogenic main hall. It is both a suitable backdrop for cultured contemplation as well as a fitting vantage point for people-watching. The window’s inviting seat is newly bedecked in a William Morris textile, a pattern popular among Arts and Crafts devotees who were also experiencing an expansion in their ranks around the time the space was devised.

The Athenaeum’s refurbished Art Room sports freshly repainted surfaces and newly reinstalled art.

Within this context, one is immediately impressed by the density of the installation. Although wall space is at a premium in this bookcase-lined room, there is ample art on view. Primarily a collection of portraiture, the result is a feeling of accompaniment in the pursuit of knowledge.

In the center of the ceiling, a generous skylight has also been glitteringly refurbished. It fills the room with natural light, which falls glintingly on the glass-topped stuffed raven that holds court at the center of a Chinese-export inlay table. Nearby, a bust of Charles Darwin by nineteenth century sculptor Jane Nye Hammond stares out unflinchingly. Pendant tables at either end of the room are now encircled with elegant black chairs designed by the local firm O&G Studio in a style appropriate for an institution of this period. Each has a brass plaque with the name of a donor who commissioned it for the purpose of this restoration.

Other details include an expertly conserved portrait by Hugo Breul, tiny silhouettes of reading characters, and an enormous patriotic bronze relief installed creatively to hide a meddlesome air vent.

A window in the Art Room looks out on the main hall of the historic library. It is topped by a bronze frieze installed during the restoration.

Even after an all-too-brief visit, the Athenaeum’s Art Room is already one of my new favorite places in town. To those who were already well-acquainted with it, seeing the remodel is akin to reuniting with an old friend who looks better than ever. The whole assemblage is not only a beautiful and thoughtful restoration, but a tribute to the spirit of the library’s community throughout the years and an exploration of a zest for art that dates to the 1890’s.

Much of the handiwork involved in making this revised Art Room a reality was that of Tripp Evans, a passionate member and volunteer. When he is not busy painting woodwork and reinstalling art, he also teaches art history as a professor at Wheaton College. The work he, and other volunteers, and Athenaeum staff like Kate have done is a continuation of the labor of many art lovers through history.

To step into the Art Room is to step back in time and to be in the blossoming art world of the late nineteenth century. I found myself at one point saying to my host that I myself wish art people today might take the same sort of bohemian glee in creating an environment as our counterparts did over a century ago. Far from being stuffy or staid or polite, the American cultural scene of this time was an exciting and even boisterous one. Rooms like the one recently restored at the Athenaeum were not just venues for quiet reading, but for serious and spirited debates about the visual arts in America.

It would be appropriate then, if this renovation sparks the kind of excitement that it merits and helps those who enter the Athenaeum’s Art Room to reimagine and interrogate art’s histories and its futures.

Under the glow of brass light fixtures and the Art Room’s skylight, portraits peer out over art books.

As much as it was an exciting place when the Art Room was added in 1896, The Athenaeum is also one today. In the last decade or so it has undergone, to use a much overused word, something of a renaissance. Always a great institution, it has recently become a decidedly hip one. It has mounted exciting public programs, refreshed its digital presence, and even restored the long dormant fountain which stands in front of its main entrance on stately Benefit Street. The renovation of the Art Room is just another feather in the cap, and a crowning one, which celebrates the unique and timeless spirit associated with this great landmark.

As my visit to the wonderfully inspiring Art Room came to a close I headed back out into the main body of the library. When exiting the space, one passes through a door newly clad in supple caramel leather. Tacks in the center of the door spell out “1836”, the year of the institution’s founding. Exiting onto the snug landing outside, one is faced with the latin phrase Ars Longa, Vita Brevis freshly stenciled in gilded letters on the green wall. To one side, the bust of Albert J. Jones stands sentry next to a vintage photograph of the Roman ruins that inspired him.

The quotation above the steps, which was added to the space during the successful remodel, rings true from antiquity to today. It means Art is Long, Life is Brief.

Below, enjoy a gallery of photographs below that I took on my recent visit to the Athenaeum’s Art Room. Thanks again to my colleague Kate Wodehouse for her gracious hospitality. As of this writing, the Athenaeum is open only to their members due to current restrictions. Visit providenceathenaeum.org for more information.

Looking at Morisot and Renoir’s Women

It is important to know art in its context. That is to say, to fully appreciate a work of art, it helps to see artworks of the same moment - to view another vision from the same time. In the case of a pair of paintings made by two different artists in the same year, in the same country, now held in the collection of the same museum, we can find divergent visions of women in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Bather Arranging Her Hair and Berthe Morisot’s The Bath were both products of the same revolutionary moment, both were painted in 1885, and both now reside not far from one another at The Clark Art Institute in Western Massachusetts. But for all they have in common, they share two opposing views of women as subject that couldn’t be more different.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Bather Arranging Her Hair, 1885, Oil on canvas. The Clark Art Institute, 1955.589.

Renoir’s painting, like so much of his work, is as dully anesthetic and as psychically alleviating now as it was when it was made. An art to be a balm from the hustle and bustle. It is something pretty to look at, and with its cotton candy tonality and its imagined and idealized beauty, it gets the job done.

Renoir depicts an unknown woman, a purposefully unidentified individual, in nature. He draws on the trope of the bath in the woods that occurs so much throughout Western art that by the time he hit upon it, it would have been clichéd. Renoir’s lady looks away from us and toward an incongruous sea that itself melds with puffy clouds far away. She is dividing her ample and shiny brown hair into two parts. Her chemise falls away to reveal the curvaceous silhouette of her nude body: a breast, a belly, a buttock, a thigh. But Renoir’s is an unreal and sensualized figure. A body in space, surely, but a body nonetheless. To classify this painting as a masterclass in the Impressionist vision of landscape is to deny the fact that there’s a woman sitting in the middle of it. A woman with no identity, and no clothes.

A product of, and leader in, the Impressionist moment which would prove one of the agitating seedbeds of Modernism, Renoir is also a character whose own reputation is constantly being re-examined. Of the first generation of Impressionist painters, he is today one of the most, and perhaps most surprisingly, controversial. The #RenoirSucksatPainting movement, for instance, winkingly asks museums to “end the treacle”.

In spite of his Impressionist bona fides, Renoir’s nudes could almost be Rococco. They are unreal to the point of surreal, and sickeningly sweet. The kind of art that makes the rattle of the guillotine sound like a reasonable solution to political differences.

When looking at them and taking them at face value it is indeed often hard to tell if Renoir himself was in on the joke, or if he was making the type of paintings the market wanted, or if he genuinely believed they were any good.

Berthe Morisot (French, 1841–1895), The Bath, 1885–86. Oil on canvas, 36 1/4 x 28 7/8 in. Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, 1955.926

In Morisot’s image of the same subject, the figure comes inside and puts her clothes on. We see a clearly bourgeois woman in a defined domestic space: France in 1885, a woman getting ready for the day. Morisot’s subject is an upwardly mobile denizen of the new middle class of the nineteenth century; both urban and urbane.

She looks out at us piercingly and unwaveringly while arranging her own hair not dissimilarly to her counterpart in Renoir’s picture. Her chemise is firmly on, however, while a brush sits in her lap and a ribbon rounds her neck. A gold bracelet and a wedding ring glitter on her delicate wrist and finger. Her clothing hides her body. She is a woman with both identity and agency. A thoroughly modern woman - at odds with Renoir’s mythological forest lady.

It is also noteworthy that Morisot’s painterly treatment of her own scene dovetails nicely with the technical elements of Renoir’s painting. These were, after all, two artists of a similar ilk, working within the same milieu. Where Renoir’s sitter is absorbed in ethereal atmosphere of light and clouds, Morisot’s is dissolved into a residential interior, with only a chair and a table to divide her from the wall. Both paintings are brashly Impressionist but their depictions of women still differ.

It is conceivable when looking at Morisot’s painting that her subject might have a life, a job, and even a purpose. She is decidedly unnymphlike and completely unsensual. She is dignified. A real woman in a real world. Renoir’s is not.

The bath as subject is an inherently voyeuristic enterprise. As the viewer of one of these paintings, we are always walking in on a woman, and typically a woman alone. We are either stumbling unwittingly, or perhaps sauntering provocatively, into a private reserve. In Renoir’s painting he allows and encourages the voyeuristic sensibilities of his audience. We become the proverbial elders to his own biblical Susanna. In Morisot’s however, the subject is aware of us and her unflinching gaze makes us aware of ourselves and of our trespass. We are seen, and the interaction is disconcerting.

Bath paintings were also often, even if subliminally, created for a male audience. Under the guise of such accepted subject matter a gentleman collector could also acquire a titillating nude. It is a kind of softcore mythology. Morisot’s painting undermines that too. Her painting defies expectations of a bath scene and could as easily be a painting for a female consumer, to whom her sitter would undoubtedly say “je suis tois”.

All of this is not to say that Renoir is somehow evil. It is not an attack on his painting(s), or, as some back door Freudian interpretation might read it, an attack on male painters more generally. To draw a comparison between these two pictures is merely to elevate our understanding of them both, and our appreciation for the societal changes occurring at breakneck speeds as the nineteenth century drew to a close.

Renoir’s nude is no doubt a product of history and of its time. But Morisot’s signals a future that she herself didn’t live to see - that of women who were not mere objects in painting, but who were makers of their own destiny. A world in which women climbed down from the pedestal in order to live in the real world. A world, for instance, in which women could vote. In Morisot’s native France, as an example, women were not enfranchised until 1944, over a century after the artist was born.

A woman in the boys club of Impressionism, Morisot was all too aware of the inequalities which faced her both within her movement and in society at large. In an incisive, telling, and heartbreaking quote from her diary, she wrote “I don’t think there has ever been a man who treated a woman as an equal, and that’s all I would have asked for – I know I am worth as much as they are.”

In The Bath Morisot turns the idea of her titular subject on its head and makes it a moment of engagement rather than of objectification. She depicts the new type of woman who populated Parisian streets as the world inched toward the turn of the century. Renoir’s Bather Arranging Her Hair, on the other hand, shows a type of female archetype who was herself already receding from art even as the paint was drying.

While Renoir’s bather looks backwards, Morisot’s looks forwards. Renoir paints an already fading history while Morisot paints a thrilling reality and a promising future. Indeed, Morisot’s bather incapsulates Modernity itself.