Elizabeth Nourse: Changing Times

"Interior with Mother and Child" by Elizabeth Nourse

"After the Armistice it appeared that the artistic life of Paris would simply continue much as it had before the way. In 1919 Elizabeth Nourse showed paintings and her Breton dolls at four exhibitions, selling a watercolor at the New Salon. Despite her robust activities during the war and after, she appears to have been suffering as early as 1915 from an undiagnosed illness. She consulted several doctors during the next few years but not until early 1920 was it discovered that she had cancer of the breast. A mastectomy was performed in March of that year. As a result she was unable to paint at her easel for some time, but while she was convalescing she amused herself by sketching watercolor views of the Luxembourg Gardens as they appeared by day and by night from her studio window. 

Nourse participated in her last Salon in 1921 with one oil and two pastels. An oil version of 'Consolation' was left in her estate and her scrapbook contains a photograph dated 1914 showing the models posing for it. Painted in warm colors of russet, blue and orange, the oil must have seemed distinctly old-fashioned to the postwar public, which by then had seen a rapid succession of modern styles.

Realist subject matter, at least the type that had been presented at Paris Salons for so many years, appeared to have little future. Nourse must have recognized this because in 1924 she ceased to exhibit and continued to paint only for her own pleasure. She was then sixty-five years old and unwilling to accept recent trends in the art world that seemed to negate the importance of recognizable subject matter.

Six years later, in 1930, she wrote: 'There is little in art since the War to make one enthusiastic. I do not hold at all with the latest fads, the Cubistes - the Fauves - as they are called. Do you know Camille Manclair's 'La Farce de l'Art Vivant'? He expresses my opinion very clearly."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Cincinnati Societaire" by Mary Alice Heekin Burke in "Elizabeth Nourse, 1859-1938: A Salon Career)