Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D.Waters, Clara Erskine Clement
History
Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D.
Waters, Clara Erskine Clement
Women artists -- Biography
hope to have the opportunity of referring.... She is a fine example of
that singleness of devotion which characterizes the born artist. Her art
is the all-absorbing interest of her life. It is not without its
limitations, but within these limitations the artist has known how to be
true to herself. Drawing her inspiration direct from nature, she has held
on her independent way, steadily faithful to the gift she possesses of
evoking a character in a portrait or of making us feel how the common
task, when representative of genuine human effort and touched with the
poetry of national tradition, of religion, and of nature, becomes a
subject of noble artistic treatment. She has kept unimpaired that
_merveilleux frisson de sensibilité_ which is one of the most precious
gifts of the artistic temperament, and which is quick to respond to the
ideal in the real. There are some artists who, though possessed of
extraordinary mastery over the materials of their art, bring to their
work a spirit which beggars and belittles both art and life; there are
others who seem to work with an ever-present sense of the noble purpose
of their vocation and the pathos and dignity of existence. Mlle. Rapin
belongs to the second category. Her 'L'Horloger' is an example of this. A
Genevese watchmaker is bending to his work at a bench covered with tools.
Through the window of the workshop one perceives in the blue distance
Mont Saléve, and nearer the time-honored towers of the Cathedral of St.
Pierre. Here is a composition dealing with simple life--a composition
which, from the point of execution, color, and harmony of purpose, leaves
little or nothing to be desired. But this is not all. It is, so to speak,
an artistic _résumé_ of the life and history of the old city, and that
strongly portrayed national type gathers dignity from his alliance with
the generations who helped to make one of the main interests of the city,
and from his relationship to that eventful past suggested by the
Cathedral and the Mountain.
"Mlle. Rapin is unmistakably one of the best Swiss portraitists, working
for the most part in pastels, her medium by predilection; she has at the
same time modelled portraits in bas-relief. We are not only impressed by
the intensely living quality of her work as a portraitist, but by the
extraordinary power with which she has seized and expressed the
individual character and history of each of her subjects."
Mlle. Rapin has exhibited her works with success in Paris, Munich, and
Berlin. The few specimens of her bas-reliefs which I have seen prove that
did she prefer the art of sculpture before that of painting, she would be
as successful with her modelling tools as she has been with her brush.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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