This is one of my favorite recent posts of yours. I adore Morisot’s work and your piece represents it well. I hadn’t thought of the connection with labor, which was insightful.
How she and male impressionists portrayed women caring for their bodies (bathing, brushing hair…) is also illuminating. As you note, Morisot was a woman of privilege, yet her work creates an intimacy that isn’t acquisitive. Quite unlike her more famous brother in law.
I think you are stretching here. Both painters did few paintings depicting labor. Morisot focused much on the domestic world of women of her class. Caillebotte also did some more or less traditional views of women, i.e., they are basically doing nothing, including nudes, but what is far more interesting about him is that he placed men in roles usually only depicted of women--taking a bath, playing the piano, etc.
I got a great book of all of morisot’s paintings which I looked through fairly recently…and I think there’s more on labor than you’re suggesting. there are other pictures of women doing washing; also pictures of fruit picking, sewing, of nurses caring for her child…and of other artistic endeavors like music and painting. and of course the famous pictures of her at her mirror arranging clothes, which I think is a kind of labor (and I think she represents it as such.)
I’m less familiar with caillebotte’s whole oeuvre, but depictions of labor were definitely a thing for male impressionists in general…and I think that even if this is his only picture, you can still think about what it means and how he thinks about labor!
You have an extremely broad definition of labor. I would certainly distinguish between Morisot's paintings of women of her own class doing very minimal work such as Young Woman Watering a Scrub, Young Woman Sewing in a Garden and The Butterfly Hunt from her depictions of the female servants in her household. The impressionists with which I am familiar almost invariably depicted females of the servant class (except of course when they were painting relatives, etc.) or in the case of Pissaro, female peasants, as in Peasant Females Planting Stakes. Caillebotte was rather unusual in so many ways, including his depictions of male labor. But how they treated their laborers varied considerably from Monet's depressing The Coal Workers where the workers are simply blobs with no individuality to Manet's Olympia with a confident, nude courtesan staring directly at the viewer. She certainly has individuality.
In my view Morisot and Caillebotte stand somewhere in-between these two extremes. Their laborers are not simply blobs (in most instances) but we have no sense of individuality ( in Morisot's paintings of servants, for example, they wear blue) and I certainly do not think either artists identified his/her labor with theirs. First, in regard to Caillebotte, in the painting of the planners we view the men from above thus separating ourselves from the men and we only get a glimpse of their faces. Likewise, in The Gardeners we are in fact placed at a distance from them and only see a sketchy side view of one gardener. And in Oarsmen Rowing on the Yerres we are right there with them but their faces are entirely shielded by their hats. This as opposed to The Boating Party in which we are directly looking at an obvious gentlemen (he is wearing a top hat and has laid aside his suit jacket). Morisot uses the same distancing with her depictions of servants. The only painting I found in which there is a servant with a recognizable face looking at the viewer is The Bowl of Milk and this is a young, very striking girl. In the one of the woman nursing, we cannot recognize her face. In the example of hanging the wash which you used, we are very far distant from the woman and again we cannot make out her face. Morisot has another. closer view of a woman hanging wash but we only get a side view. In The Little Maid Servant we are placed at a distance, one room removed, from the side view of a servant, whose figure is cut off by the doorway. We do not know what she is doing. Likewise, in The Rouart's Dining Room, we only see the back of a servant walking out of the room.
I think it’s generally a good idea to define labor broadly; part of what this piece is about is some of the problems when the definition is restricted to masculine coded endeavors.
I don’t necessarily think individuality and identification have to be the same thing? The wet nurse’s face is obscured in that painting, but I don’t think that means Morisot is not identifying with her, or that there’s no parallel. When you don’t see the face that can mean that there’s figures are more open to identification; you can put yourself in their place.
Morisot notably blurs her own face in her self portraits with mirrors, I think. She does sometimes have more indivudualized portraits, but some of those at least are ones where she comes closest to eroticized tropes, and they seem less about identification than (maybe) desire.
I do not buy it. We are going to have to agree to disagree. While Pissaro specifically thought of his technique of painting as similar to the hard work demanded of rural workers, we have no such statement about her painting from Morisot. She sought to paint like a child. “Every day I pray that the Good Lord will make me like a child, That is to say, that He will make me see nature and render it the way a child would without preconceptions ." You might find interesting this essay on Morisot's creation of female intimacy with women of her class (and she was from the haute bourgeoisie).These works are very different from her paintings in which servants are present. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14787318.2021.1926875
I find it hard to believe she didn’t identify with the labor of the wet nurse?! and she makes pretty direct parallels between the work of making herself up and painting…I don’t think that’s a particularly outre interpretation…
This is one of my favorite recent posts of yours. I adore Morisot’s work and your piece represents it well. I hadn’t thought of the connection with labor, which was insightful.
How she and male impressionists portrayed women caring for their bodies (bathing, brushing hair…) is also illuminating. As you note, Morisot was a woman of privilege, yet her work creates an intimacy that isn’t acquisitive. Quite unlike her more famous brother in law.
Yes; they were close friends but you do wonder what she thought about Olympia! (maybe she said somewhere...?)
I think you are stretching here. Both painters did few paintings depicting labor. Morisot focused much on the domestic world of women of her class. Caillebotte also did some more or less traditional views of women, i.e., they are basically doing nothing, including nudes, but what is far more interesting about him is that he placed men in roles usually only depicted of women--taking a bath, playing the piano, etc.
I got a great book of all of morisot’s paintings which I looked through fairly recently…and I think there’s more on labor than you’re suggesting. there are other pictures of women doing washing; also pictures of fruit picking, sewing, of nurses caring for her child…and of other artistic endeavors like music and painting. and of course the famous pictures of her at her mirror arranging clothes, which I think is a kind of labor (and I think she represents it as such.)
I’m less familiar with caillebotte’s whole oeuvre, but depictions of labor were definitely a thing for male impressionists in general…and I think that even if this is his only picture, you can still think about what it means and how he thinks about labor!
You have an extremely broad definition of labor. I would certainly distinguish between Morisot's paintings of women of her own class doing very minimal work such as Young Woman Watering a Scrub, Young Woman Sewing in a Garden and The Butterfly Hunt from her depictions of the female servants in her household. The impressionists with which I am familiar almost invariably depicted females of the servant class (except of course when they were painting relatives, etc.) or in the case of Pissaro, female peasants, as in Peasant Females Planting Stakes. Caillebotte was rather unusual in so many ways, including his depictions of male labor. But how they treated their laborers varied considerably from Monet's depressing The Coal Workers where the workers are simply blobs with no individuality to Manet's Olympia with a confident, nude courtesan staring directly at the viewer. She certainly has individuality.
In my view Morisot and Caillebotte stand somewhere in-between these two extremes. Their laborers are not simply blobs (in most instances) but we have no sense of individuality ( in Morisot's paintings of servants, for example, they wear blue) and I certainly do not think either artists identified his/her labor with theirs. First, in regard to Caillebotte, in the painting of the planners we view the men from above thus separating ourselves from the men and we only get a glimpse of their faces. Likewise, in The Gardeners we are in fact placed at a distance from them and only see a sketchy side view of one gardener. And in Oarsmen Rowing on the Yerres we are right there with them but their faces are entirely shielded by their hats. This as opposed to The Boating Party in which we are directly looking at an obvious gentlemen (he is wearing a top hat and has laid aside his suit jacket). Morisot uses the same distancing with her depictions of servants. The only painting I found in which there is a servant with a recognizable face looking at the viewer is The Bowl of Milk and this is a young, very striking girl. In the one of the woman nursing, we cannot recognize her face. In the example of hanging the wash which you used, we are very far distant from the woman and again we cannot make out her face. Morisot has another. closer view of a woman hanging wash but we only get a side view. In The Little Maid Servant we are placed at a distance, one room removed, from the side view of a servant, whose figure is cut off by the doorway. We do not know what she is doing. Likewise, in The Rouart's Dining Room, we only see the back of a servant walking out of the room.
I think it’s generally a good idea to define labor broadly; part of what this piece is about is some of the problems when the definition is restricted to masculine coded endeavors.
I don’t necessarily think individuality and identification have to be the same thing? The wet nurse’s face is obscured in that painting, but I don’t think that means Morisot is not identifying with her, or that there’s no parallel. When you don’t see the face that can mean that there’s figures are more open to identification; you can put yourself in their place.
Morisot notably blurs her own face in her self portraits with mirrors, I think. She does sometimes have more indivudualized portraits, but some of those at least are ones where she comes closest to eroticized tropes, and they seem less about identification than (maybe) desire.
I do not buy it. We are going to have to agree to disagree. While Pissaro specifically thought of his technique of painting as similar to the hard work demanded of rural workers, we have no such statement about her painting from Morisot. She sought to paint like a child. “Every day I pray that the Good Lord will make me like a child, That is to say, that He will make me see nature and render it the way a child would without preconceptions ." You might find interesting this essay on Morisot's creation of female intimacy with women of her class (and she was from the haute bourgeoisie).These works are very different from her paintings in which servants are present. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14787318.2021.1926875
I find it hard to believe she didn’t identify with the labor of the wet nurse?! and she makes pretty direct parallels between the work of making herself up and painting…I don’t think that’s a particularly outre interpretation…
She wanted to paint freely like a child. That is not how you put on make-up.