Presentations

In 1872, Eva Gonzalès and Berthe Morisot produced intimate portrayals of feminine figures who care for ornamental plants. In Gonzalès’s La Plante favorite, a young woman pours water onto the crown of a reddish-brown cordyline—a tropical shrub with brilliant foliage that thrives in moist soil. Similarly, in Morisot’s Fillette aux jacinthes, a young girl dribbles water into a container to immerse stems of decorative and fragrant hyacinths in a nourishing bath. As scenes of modern life, these pastels examined a tremendous cultural excitement surrounding domestic gardening and floral arranging: activities deemed appropriate for upper- and middle-class white women and girls. Yet, as meditations on human/plant encounters, these pictures also explored processes of nurturing vegetal life akin to making art. Invoking botanical metaphors of growth, nourishment, and regeneration, this paper investigates how Gonzalès and Morisot each used her depiction of plant care as a source of sustenance for cultivating a distinctive visual vocabulary. Close analysis of the artists’ engagements with pastel, for example, clarifies how they employed this liquid-free medium to describe watering plants and manifest this activity’s sensory pleasures. At the same time, this paper considers how the artists’ practices of working from life were enriched, in these cases, by their relationships with their models: Gonzalès with her artist-sister Jeanne Gonzalès and Morisot with her niece, the future artist Paule Gobillard. Parsing this intertwining of personal attachment with botanical image-making illuminates these works’ power to sensitize us to the joys of female bonding and human/plant interactions, in life and through art.

Mobility or the degree to which certain kinds of women were, or were not, able to walk freely in public is a central issue of gender history for many scholars who work on the nineteenth century. This issue is especially thorny for historians who study cultural representations of modern women produced in the second half of the century. In the case of French literature and art in particular, scholars regularly invoke the separate spheres model to interpret how portrayals of women responded to gendered spatial practices. This model construes the metropolis as divided spatially along gender and class lines that also affected one’s freedom of movement: Although men were able to move freely within and across the public and the private spheres, women were restricted mainly to the latter, which could take the form of a home or brothel depending on their social status. Yet, scholars agree that this paradigm fails to account for the experiences of a whole range of actual women, though my concern here is with those who transported plants.

In this paper, I will present a project that uses historical geocoding and digital mapping to explore the gender-historical issue of mobility as it relates to Parisian art, society, and plant culture. The project maps the locations shown in paintings of Parisian women, ornamental plants, and urban spaces and those of flower markets and florist shops published in print sources. These maps visualize sites where an all-female labor force distributed and then sold fresh flora to a mostly female clientele who transported it to domestic and other spaces. My discussion of the project will clarify how paintings and maps chart an expanded field of mobility for women who moved plants. It will also propose a new rhizomatic model for studying gendered spatial practices that is structured by the same logic as the centrifugal urban plan and open grid of Paris.

Conference Report

Program

Remarkable for its vibrant palette and densely worked surface, Édouard Manet’s painting In the Conservatory elucidates how industrialization, colonialism, plant culture, and botany transformed the daily lives of upper-class Parisians. The picture shows an elegant woman and a bearded man in a lush indoor garden with a pink ixia and frondescent palms.

My paper explores how Manet thematizes the kinds of human interactions with the vegetal world that glasshouses and horticultural networks enabled. Indeed, advances in iron-and-glass construction led to a fashion for domestic conservatories, and the European ornamental plant trade exploited asymmetries of power to supply "exotic" and "tropical" species to Parisians. 

To clarify how Manet’s depiction of star-shaped ixias responds to these historical conditions, I draw on botanical illustrations from Nikolaus Joseph Jacquin's Icones plantarum rariorum and European endorsements for southern African bulb plants. Citing these sources on ixia morphology and cultivation, I argue that Manet analogizes these blossoms' petals, stem, and stigma with the woman's rouged cheek, left arm, and ring finger to comment on new knowledge about plant reproduction, selective breeding, and pollination techniques. By invoking Charles Darwin's writings on botany and pollination ecology, I construe the woman's pleated cuff and ungloved hand as recalling the role of petal decoration and display in attracting insects and the glowing embers of the man's cigar as metaphorically referencing pollen grains. 

Horticulture, the art of growing gardens and displaying plants, was a popular pastime for upper- and middle-class Parisian women throughout the second half of the 1800s. Female gardeners often cultivated decorative flowers in semi-public domestic areas, a trend that Berthe Morisot explores in Interior, On the Balcony, and Young Woman Watering a Shrub. These loosely related paintings show female figures, modeled by the artist’s sisters, in spaces within and attached to the Morisot family homes in Passy. 

While Griselda Pollock categorizes the kinds of salon, terrace, and veranda Morisot portrays as “spaces of femininity,” Hollis Clayson construes the parlor with a balcony as a “threshold space” that blurs the boundaries between “inside and out of doors.” In contrast to scholars’ tendency to foreground Morisot’s engagement with space in their interpretations of her early-career paintings, my readings of Interior, On the Balcony, and Young Woman Watering a Shrub investigate how the artist thematizes the experiences of women in domestic gardens. The theme of horticultural intimacy serves as a fertile substrate for Morisot to nurture a personal style that, as I contend, manifests both the sensual pleasures of encountering plantlife and the continuities of women’s interactions with flora across the separate spheres.

It is an irony of art history that Jules-Émile Saintin, a nineteenth-century painter specializing in the theme of remembrance, is largely forgotten today. Between 1868 and 1873, Saintin exhibited no less than five paintings of lone female figures in mourning attire,  at the Salon. In most of them, women not only wear exquisite black gowns but also hold small objects associated with the act of remembering. That Saintin repeated this subject matter again and again served as fodder for the art critic and illustrator Bertall, whose review of the 1872 Salon mocked the artist’s painting 2 Novembre 1872. The canvas, known primarily through Bertall’s satirical cartoon, shows a woman who prepares to lay a funerary wreath of golden immortelles to commemorate All Souls’ Day. Bertall’s pithy caption reads, “Cette année, la charmante petite femme de Saintin a une couronne: l’année dernière, elle avait un bouquet; l’autre année, un portrait; l’autre, une lettre; qu’aura-t-elle l’année prochaine? Toujours bien du reste, elle ne vieillit pas.” Indeed, Saintin depicted a woman holding a wreath in Fleurs de deuil and a portrait in Deuil de cœur, both of which the art dealer Goupil & Cie reproduced.

I examine how Saintin became an art historical obscurity despite his successful exhibition record, and the circulation of his images in collectible formats on the international market. Through visual analyses of Saintin’s women-in-mourning paintings and photomechanical reproductions after them, I reconstruct his midcareer oeuvre while also recuperating his brief notoriety as a painter of immortelles, or everlasting flowers.

Indoor gardening and floral still life painting were fashionable activities for women in late nineteenth-century Paris. Because these practices often involved arranging and displaying ornamental plants indoors, their meaning was entangled with societal beliefs about gender, nature, domesticity, and art. Whereas the horticultural industry marketed container gardening to upper- and middle-class women as a leisure pursuit and as part of routine maintenance for the home, the French Academy construed flower painting as a suitable pastime for amateurs and female artists who were denied access to formal training. Taking these circumstances into account, I explore how Berthe Morisot uses formally inventive means to recast an indoor garden and a floral still life as vehicles for asserting artistry and agency.

In her 1872 painting Intérieur, Morisot shows two women and a young girl in an upstairs parlor, where a bronze planter supports a thriving false palm and a gilt frame partially encloses a picture of a bouquet. By placing these representations of nature next to each other, Morisot aligns the processes of gardening and painting, of combining wet and dry mediums—whether they be water and soil, or oil and pigments—to produce a fertile substrate for cultivating fresh blooms. To investigate how Morisot, by mining these metaphorical affinities, develops a new visual language to articulate her professional ambitions, I draw on Stacy Alaimo’s concept of “undomesticated ground.” I then establish the significance of Morisot’s Intérieur for her budding career and within the art historical scholarship on women artists and female agency.

In his 1892 book on flowers, culture, and commerce, Philippe Lévêque de Vilmorin, a botanist and writer, discusses a remarkable blossoming of Paris’s horticultural industry that occurred during the early Third Republic. Vilmorin cites as evidence a sudden increase in the number of flower markets and florists’ boutiques where female merchants sold plants directly to upper-class women, like those in Berthe Morisot’s Intérieur. This painting, from 1872, shows three female figures and a decorative planter in the petit salon of the Morisot family home. Writing about such interiors, Vilmorin explains that the practices of growing, arranging, and displaying fresh blooms became so popular that “A salon without flowers would appear almost as naked as a salon without furniture” to nineteenth-century French viewers. 

Taking Vilmorin’s articulation of this trend as a social-historical context for my paper, I offer a close reading of Morisot’s Intérieur that focuses on her engagement with the types of women who cultivated indoor gardens and the sorts of spaces where ornamental plants bloomed. In order to connect the actual place that Morisot depicts in her painting to real points within the Parisian horticultural network, I use mapping to plot the location of her family home in relation to other urban sites, such as the Marché de Passy and Les Halles, where women sold fresh flowers. This strategy allows me to consider how Morisot’s Intérieur responded to the roles that female shoppers, who were also often pedestrians, played in the circulation of plants from commercial to domestic spaces.