Elizabeth Gardner Bouguereau: A Ménagerie

"Deux Mères de Famille"
by Elizabeth Gardner Bouguereau

"Elizabeth Gardner loved birds, animals, and children. They enter into the story here because of their constant presence in her paintings and in her everyday life. They also serve to paint a picture of the artist's interior, her studio space. Whatever found itself within the physical parameters of her studio could also have been 'fair game' for a canvas.  The earliest mention of her ménagerie occurs in an 1867 description of her studio:

'We are enjoying our new studio though we often wish we were a little nearer the center of Paris. We have a splendid great room to work in. Just now our family is quite numerous. We have a little French girl living with us. We found that our housekeeping and sewing took too much time so we took a little orphan child who had neither home nor relatives. She is pretty and very smart. She is delighted to be here and says that she shall never leave us.

And we have a splendid great dog, an African hound, he is an enormous fellow just one yard high. He is very useful to put in pictures. 

I have had a present of two lovely turtle-doves. They are perfectly tame and play about the studio all day, often lighting on our shoulders. We fear that they are destined to be eaten by the dog for he is a hunter and at first chased them about, now they will get on his back when he is asleep and he does not like it.'

Gardner, at one point, had as many as twenty-six birds in her aviary! Though they demanded a lot of attention, they were a great comfort to her when she was alone. Her studio and birds were described in her hometown paper, the 'Exeter News-Letter.'

'Elizabeth J. Gardner is a great lover of birds, and the antechamber of her charming apartment in the rue Notre Dame des Champs was filled with cages of her chirping friends. Love-birds and peroquets seemed her favorites, and the cages were large, roomy, wire affairs, where the domestic life of her feathered pets was carried on in great comfort and freedom. Her studio was a large and lofty room, lighted by skylight, and filled with pictures, bric-a-brac and couches, fine rugs, and beautiful tapestries, all in an artistic confusion, which only the unsophisticated philistine could believe was chance. Her salons, through which one wandered to reach the studio, were more conventionally French, but full also of objects of art and virtu. But it was especially in the studio, that Miss Gardner's friends were wont to gather, and there one was sure to meet with cordial welcome, most graciously given, a cup of the tea that cheers, and a company the most interesting and varied, for besides her rank as an artist, Madame Bouguereau has the true New England love of culture, and, being a brilliant conversationalist, gathers about her many clever people.'

Three Salon works that had birds as subjects were, 'Deux mères de famille,' 'Dans le bois,' and 'La Captive.' In 'Deux mères de famille' she is making a moral statement about the healthy young mother's instinctive and entirely wholesome attitude to her child, inscribed as natural by finding its echo in the he and her chicks.' In true academic style, her paintings are 'tinged with moral associations, signifying purity, a striving for the ideal, a belief in the power of beauty, and a respect for tradition and enduring values.' "

To be continued

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