Elizabeth Gardner Bouguereau: Doing Well

"Garde" by Elizabeth Gardner Bouguereau

"In 1881, at the time the Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs was founded, Elizabeth Gardner had already shown thirteen paintings at ten Salons. She was making her way on her own through hard work and perseverance. She spent little time socializing, even within the art community. Her reputation had now been established and she was having fewer difficulties finding clients to purchase her work. She explained her position in a letter to her brother John:

'I have sent to the Spring exhibition two important pictures, the best I have done. The jury gave them No. 1. The exhibition does not open till May 1st. I shall have to wait till its close in June or July to know what I shall realize from these pictures. I think my prospects are very bright. My career in Paris has been very expensive and I have sometimes made mistakes and met with disappointments but for the last two years I have been decidedly getting ahead, and have not only paid easily all my expenses but have got rid of some old obligations. Now I ought to be earning still more and have a little extra for those I love. I will do my best. 

Everything looks bright. May strangers are coming over and I hope they will bring plenty of money. The more I see of very rich people the better contented I feel with a modest position, honorably earned. I see families so excited with sudden wealth and then again so wretched when a crash comes that I have no desire to be among the number.'

Any extra money, even small amounts, Elizabeth could manage to put aside was sent to her family in Exeter. She never travelled abroad except for two return visits to America in 1871 and 1877, and a visit to Italy with Bouguereau in the late 1890s. On one occasion in 1882 she put off a visit home because of her work:

'One reason I postponed my letter was that I dreaded to tell mother that I must again defer my visit home. I wanted to go and tried to arrange it, but I have been so successful in receiving orders and so many are pushing to keep me back, from jealousy, that I feel I ought to remain near and make hay while the sun shines.'"

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Elizabeth Jane Gardner: Her Life, Her Work, Her Letters," MA Thesis by Charles Pearo, McGill University, 1997.)