Elizabeth Nourse: Barbizon

"Head of a Breton Woman (Jeune fille de Plougastel)"
by Elizabeth Nourse

"In Elizabeth Nourse's continuing struggles to support herself and her sister, Louise was an indispensable assistant. Not only was she a frugal housekeeper but an astute business manager and secretary who took care of all shipping arrangements to the hundreds of exhibitions that Elizabeth entered over the years and handled all related financial details. As a result, Elizabeth was left completely free to devote herself to her work. A rapid painter, she always had a number of works on exhibition at the same time. It should be noted that all of the exhibitions she entered were juried. It was thus a testimony to her stature as an artist that her work was concurrently shown all over Europe and the United States.

Nourse's first trip outside Paris that summer was in the nature of a pilgrimage, to visit the village of Barbizon, locale of Jean-Francois Millet, the French artist she most admired and emulated. Deeply attracted to Millet's subject matter and to his simplicity in portraying it, she must have studied his work with care at his retrospective exhibition in Paris earlier that year, for her very first sketch upon arriving in Barbizon was of the cottage in which Millet had lived and worked. She sought out the woman who had been Millet's model for 'The Angelus' and made a fine character sketch of her, inscribed 'La mere Adele' and even bought the cloak the woman had worn when she posed for Millet, as well as a spinning wheel. Her admiration for the French painter was apparently well known to her friends, several of whom gave her reproductions of his paintings for birthday and Christmas gifts.

Louis wrote glowing descriptions to her sister Adelaide of the summer in Barbizon where, she said, Everywhere you look you see a Millet picture.' The sisters were delighted to be in the countryside, which moved Louise to exclaim, 'Oh, the beautiful country, la Belle France! We have found it at last.'"

To be continued

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