The Arts Society Dukeries’ next lecture is on Wednesday 1st February and is entitled ‘Berthe Morisot: Une Finesse Fragonardienne’.
The light-filled canvases of impressionist painter Berthe Morisot capture the pleasures of modernity: fashionable ballgowns, afternoons spent boating on a lake, children playing.
Yet, her contemporaries perceived a connection with the 18th century. Renoir declared her ‘the last elegant and ‘feminine’ artist that we have had since Fragonard.’ Surveying the 1896 posthumous retrospective of her oeuvre, Paul Girard declared ‘it is the eighteenth century modernised.’
Eighteenth-century art fell from favour following the French Revolution, but was rediscovered in the mid-19th century by collectors including Louis La Caze and Hippolyte Walferdin. Morisot copied works by Boucher; she experimented with red chalk, a technique closely associated with Rococo drawings; she also admired the English painters Gainsborough, Reynolds and Romney, whose work she first encountered on honeymoon in the Isle of Wight and London.
This lecture traces Morisot’s engagement with 18th-century art and culture, and highlights what set her work apart from that of her predecessors.
The following lecture on Wednesday 1st March will be entitled Vivaldi in Venice.
The Society meets at the Civic Centre, Long Lane, Carlton-in-Lindrick S81 9AP. Tea and coffee are available from 10.00am, ready to start by 11.00am and lasting for approximately one hour. Free car parking is available. Members pay an annual subscription; visitors are welcome for a small charge.
If you are interested in the arts in all forms, go along to a lecture and find out more.
For further information on lectures, the June holiday, special interest days or the Society in general, phone Gill on 01909 540506 or email Gordon at gordonpmcdougall@gmail.com, or visit www.theartssociety.org/Dukeries.