Women Painters of the World: From the Time of Caterina Vigri, 1413-1463, to Rosa Bonheur and the Present Day
History
Women Painters of the World: From the Time of Caterina Vigri, 1413-1463, to Rosa Bonheur and the Present Day
Painting -- History; Women painters -- Biography
But if genius has its Mirandas and its Regans no less than its
infinite types of men, ranging from Prospero and Ferdinand to Caliban
and Trinculo, its union of the sexes does not remain always at peace
within the sphere of art. Sometimes, in the genius of men, the female
characteristics gain mastery over the male qualities; at other times
the male attributes of woman's genius win empire and precedence over
the female; and whenever these things happen, the works produced in
art soon recede from the world's sympathies, losing all their first
freshness. They may guide us, perhaps, as finger-posts in history,
pointing the way to some movement of interest; but their first
popularity as art is never renewed. Style is the man in the genius of
men, style is the woman in the genius of the fair. No male artist,
however gifted he may be, will ever be able to experience all the
emotional life to which women are subject; and no woman of abilities,
how much soever she may try, will be able to borrow from men anything
so invaluable to art as her own intuition and the prescient tenderness
and grace of her nursery-nature. Thus, then, the bisexuality of genius
has limits in art, and those limits should be determined by a worker's
sex.
As examples in art of complete womanliness, mention may be made of two
exquisite portraits by Madame Le Brun, in which, whilst representing
her little daughter and herself, the painter discloses the inner
essence and the life of maternal love, and discloses them with a
caressing playfulness of passion unattainable by men, and sometimes
unappreciated by men. Here, indeed, we have the poetry of universal
motherhood, common to the household hearts of good women the wide
world over. Such pictures may not be the highest form of painting, but
highest they are in their own realm of human emotion; and they recall
to one's memory that truth in which Napoleon the Great ranked the
gentler sex as the most potent of all creative artists. "The future
destiny of children," said he, "is always the work of mothers."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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