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In April of 1876, from the walls of the second ever impressionist exhibition at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in Paris, a woman with veiled eyes and a parasol gazed out from Claude Monet’s painting. The wind throws her dress, bends the grass, scatters the clouds, but her eyes remain fixed and steady. It’s a moment, and it’s forever. Ten years later, Monet revisited essentially the same image: a woman, a parasol, a sunny day, a veil. But she doesn’t look at us anymore—her eyes land somewhere out of frame. The original painting was of Camille, Monet’s first wife. This one is just “Woman with a Parasol, Facing Left.” Except it’s not just any woman. It’s Suzanne Hoschedé, stepdaughter of Monet and his favorite model after Camille’s death. Perhaps it’s no wonder, then, that Monet wasn’t thrilled with the arrival of Theodore Earl Butler (1861-1936), an American who not only set up artistic shop in Giverny in the late 1880s but also took a fancy to Suzanne (Monet was in fact so displeased with the development of their impending nuptials that he threatened to sell his house and leave the village altogether). But on July 20th, 1892, the marriage of Theodore and Suzanne went ahead, and a diary entry from artist Theodore Robinson reveals at least a slight change in heart from Monet (“Considerable feeling on the part of the parents,” Robinson writes, “Frequent showers, champagne and gaiety…Dinner and evening at the Monet’s”). Butler’s affinity for Monet comes across clearly in many of his domestic scenes at Maison Baptiste with his newly-formed family. The purple-blue haze cast over portraits of his wife and infant children in the early to mid-1890s finds close companions in Monet’s renderings of morning light playing off of cathedral walls and snowy haystacks. Butler’s portrait above of Suzanne, Jimmy, and Lily, then, is a marked departure from these earlier domestic scenes. The palette strays far from realism, saturated in pinks and greens applied in wide, swooping strokes, pushing into a post-impressionist terrain. The scene is formal, even oddly so. The two children stand at attention, slightly distanced from their mother, their eyes rapt on her. She leans forward in her chair, seemingly on the verge of speech, hands clasped in her lap and shoulders back, a posture of elegance and reserve. To compare this with some of Monet’s earlier portraits of Suzanne (where she reads in the grass, gets lost in thought, stands with an assured swagger on an afternoon stroll) is to wonder whether married life and motherhood have transformed her, or whether Butler had a particular aim in his portrayal of his partner. Anxieties abounded in fin-de-siècle France around the idea of the “new woman” (or the “femme nouvelle”): she was educated, she was athletic, she was thinking about divorce. In this light, Butler’s image can appear as a reification of the domestic destiny many men at the turn of the century still desired for their wives, wherein her main roles were still to beautify the home and act as a moral exemplar for the children. Suzanne’s lines neatly match the curve of the chair she sits in—is she intended to be ornamental, fused with her environs? Or is it a typical impressionist’s anonymizing of individual characteristics in order to treat the world as a series of surfaces and forms in light and shadow to be manipulated into something flatter, fleeting? Yet just as easily this could be read as the portrayal of a woman whose identity stretches beyond motherhood—she is not embedded with or subsumed by her children, but maintains independence through a tender but clear distance from them. The poof of her pompadour hair and mutton sleeves (all the rage in the 1890s) indicate an engagement with the world beyond the walls of the home. The confident air of singledom in earlier images of Suzanne has been replaced by something more like a self-possession that maintains itself within the braided ties of a family. Butler’s palette takes the seemingly straightforward domestic scene and lends it a modernist edge—where it ultimately lands on the spectrum of possession to freedom, or traditionalism to progress, is up to you. To inquire about this work, head here. (This month’s feature is in part to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the first impressionist show, which opened in Paris in April of 1874. If you’ll be in Paris or Washington, D.C. in the coming months, check out the traveling exhibition honoring the sesquicentennial!)
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