That is, except for one painting, “Awakening Girl,” in which a young woman is waking up in her bed in fresh morning light. The sheets, her night dress, the pillows - all are white, and her fresh, youthful skin is painted with such a fine touch that I can’t imagine how much Gonzalès must have labored over it.
The book and flowers on the nightstand, and the nightstand itself, are details that convey the loving playfulness and spirit of inquiry that this subject possesses, and are painted with real care and affection.
Marie Bracquemond’s finesse as a painter, her true celebration of color and light, and the seeming ease with which she was able to render figures in drawing are all made poignant and painful by the troubles she had in her marriage. This artist saw into the delicacy of female beauty, and the pain of it.
Her precise mastery of color-choice and her ability to render the care she took to paint a dress, a jacket, or even a simple shadow with such brio, all brought to her work a kind of freedom of expression that even the three other women in this exhibition did not always achieve.
For me, Bracquemond is the find of this show. A little watercolor she did in 1880, called “Woman with Umbrella,” in which a young woman with a pleased expression on her face looks at us from beneath an umbrella intended to protect her from the sun, is a real star-turn. Her dress, in gray and white stripes, is restricted from the waist up by the stripes and buttons. Perhaps she’s wearing a corset underneath, but below her waist, the dress is free. The lightness of the material, the delicacy of the many levels of cascading cloth, and the sense of her body as being unhindered by the dress, even glorified by it, made me wish that I could ask her to sit with me a moment on a park bench to talk with me. The shadow she casts, a splotch of gray-black watercolor extending from her feet, is simple, imprecise and beautiful in its detail. All beneath a simple rose-colored umbrella.
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