Claude Monet, Springtime, or The Reader
Last time, we looked at John Abbot McNeill Whistler’s ‘Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl’ (1864) and its mixture of boredom and opulence. As Whistler’s model Jo Hiffernan stares into the middle of nowhere, leaning on the mantelpiece in her billowing white dress, she looks a lot like all the other silent Victorian women in white dresses.
For a long time in this series, I’d been putting off the Monets and the Manets, those Impressionist women sitting in fields – perhaps because they seemed so generic. Now I’m finding sympathy for them, and enthusiasm for their very genericism. There is a whole sub-genre of spring in art history which we might call Dolce Far Niente – sweet idleness – or we might simply call them The Bored Girls of Spring.
I’d been putting off the Monets and the Manets – perhaps because they seemed so generic. Now I’m finding sympathy for them
Camille Doncieux sits reading in a garden, her white skirt pooling into surrounding green.
What was radical about Claude Monet’s ‘Springtime’ (1872) were those unblended dabs of paint, which allowed the viewer to experience the sun as filtering through the leaves. Now so familiar, I find it hard not to experience the dappled light as filtered through the unblended dabs of Impressionism.
Frederick Arthur Bridgman,Dolce Far Niente (Sweet Nothings)
We might praise the way Monet bends a protective canopy over his wife. The lively brushstrokes in the top-left passage of the painting see the greenery encircling her, curling like a wave. Enfolded in this secluded shade, it’s as if nature has parted, providing a cosy spot to do her reading.
But when you think about it, seclusion is not so far from social distancing. From these coronavirus times, viewing images of women isolated outdoors, the effect is almost uncanny. What has struck me – in a way that I had intellectualised before but not been able to feel on my nerve-endings until living under lockdown restrictions – is that there really wasn’t all that much Victorian women could do.
From these coronavirus times, viewing images of women isolated outdoors, the effect is almost uncanny
Even reading was a little racy; read too enthusiastically, and you’d be branded a ‘blue-stocking’, seen to be challenging men’s ‘natural’ intellectual superiority. This was a lockdown imposed by the patriarchy.
Impressionists made the white dress synonymous with natural beauty, the balminess of the weather mingled with refined femininity. But that white dress is synecdoche for so much more: for virginal purity, and for bourgeois status (you couldn’t work in it or do much else besides, without getting it dirty) – for gendered restriction.
John William Godward, When the heart is young
Women in white appear again and again in this period, flowers among flowers, ornaments among ornaments. You wonder if these dresses might have had zappers stitched in, to electrically shock their wearer any time she approached the edge of the domestic sphere.
Dolce Far Niente is an Italian phrase that literally means ‘sweet doing nothing’, and many paintings from the nineteenth century share this title. Idleness was coded as sweetness, women as the kind of confectionary you might pluck from a chocolate box. Yet doing nothing was imposed.
Idleness was coded as sweetness, women as the kind of confectionary you might pluck from a chocolate box. Yet doing nothing was imposed
If I had to pick one ‘Dolce Far Niente’ it would be Auguste Toulmouche’s 1877 offering. A woman splayed on a plush sofa props up her head with her hand, while plump cushions in turn support her elbow. With a book open on her lap, she stares blankly towards the viewer. This painting is crying out for a meme or one of Daniel Mallory Ortberg’s brilliant captions for his series on The Toast. Maybe it would read:
oh no
no don’t worry
I wasn’t reading my book at all
please
keep talking.
Jacques-Louis David, Portrait of a Woman in White
It’s this layer of irony afforded by internet culture which draws me to Toulmouche. Darren Haggar tapped into the zeitgeist with his cover design for Otessa Moshfegh’s 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation. The book takes Dolce Far Niente to the next level, as we follow a beautiful, privileged young woman in the early 00s, who goes into narcotic hibernation for a year with the help of the world’s worst psychiatrist.
Its cover features Jacques-Louis David’s ‘Portrait of a Woman in White’ (c. 1798), which shows a woman in a translucent muslin bodice-dress against a dull background. Overlaying the portrait is the title in hot pink upper case, which tips the woman’s facial expression, as she gazes outside the frame, from docile to cutting. If she also decided to chemically tap out of all the nonsense, you’d back her.
Sweetness here is somewhat banal and sickly, the busy blue upholstery not unlike the packaging of a Wham chew bar
At least one Victorian girl in white succeeds in getting us on her side without imagined Impact font, i.e. on the painting’s own terms. In ‘Little Girl in a Blue Armchair’ (1878), Mary Cassatt’s tilted picture plane draws our attention to the haphazard arrangement of four blue armchairs; crashed out just as haphazardly in one of them is a little girl. This time she really is a child, rather than a woman infantilised.
The girl is not simply sweet, and nor is idleness. Sweetness here is somewhat banal and sickly, the busy blue upholstery not unlike the packaging of a Wham chew bar. Her innocence is balanced by her slightly petulant expression.
Mary Cassatt, Little Girl in a Blue Armchair
Swamped by the chairs in this sterile room, and dolled up from the sparkling buckles of her shoes to the tartan bow in her neat hair, this girl. Could. Not. Give. A. S*it. She meets all this primness with a hissy-fit slouch. This might be the moment before her mother, or more likely, her nanny storms in and tells her to sit up straight. As restlessness meets languorousness, the girl rebels against an adult world full of constraints and decisions made over her head. It’s a world, then, shared by all the other Bored Girls of Spring. How tiresome!
Stuck in a perpetual state of blossoming and fading, you might well slouch, give cutting side-eye, knock yourself out with valium or read until your stockings are bluer than blue. Through Cassatt’s eyes, sweet doing nothing has never looked so sweet.
Read ‘Spring in Art 5: The Bored Girls of Spring, Part One’ here.
