TREASURE:
Hilaire-Germaine-Edgar
Degas (1834 – 1917)
The Laundress Ironing (La Blanchisseuse
Repassant), c1882 – 1886
oil on canvas
76-45-1
The
Laundress Ironing is
one of a series of paintings by Edgar
Degas depicting women in every day activities.
Women bathing, shopping, combing their
hair, practicing the ballet, were of great
interest to Degas throughout his career.
A maverick of the French Impressionist
school, he often opposed artistic trends
that were not his own. Degas objected,
for instance, to the Impressionist insistence
that painting be done outdoors. Nonetheless,
he was one of the first Impressionists
to achieve widespread recognition of his
work; and he encouraged his talented colleagues
and helped them as a teacher, especially
two great women Impressionists, Berthe
Morisot and Mary Cassatt.
Degas
constantly experimented with different
media and methods of creating art. He
was one of the first artists to use photography
as art, and he worked in oil, did engravings
and lithographs, and sculpted. Degas also
refined the use of pastels to finished
pieces. The Laundress Ironing was developed in several studies in pastel before being
executed in oil on canvas.
There
are two opinions about the painting in
terms of the white areas through which
the ironer’s head appears. Some
art historians believe the painting is
unfinished; others believe the white areas
are pieces of cloth on a line waiting
to be ironed. The watermelon-red shirt
tends to relieve the olives and browns
of the painting that invoke the tedium
of this job.
This
painting has been loaned to other institutions
internationally, most recently to the
worldwide sold out exhibit “L’impressionismo
e L’etá de Van Gogh”
in Treviso, north Italy.
TREASURE:
Narcisse
Virgile Díaz de la Peña
(1807/8 – 1876)
Forest of Fontainebleau,
1844-1851
oil on wood
14-22-1
This
painting represents a defining movement
in art history: the Barbizon School.
Barbizon is a small village on the edge
of the Fontainebleau Forest in France.
Shortly before the mid-1800s, a group
of artists started to leave Paris and
their studios to paint landscapes by
actually being in them. In art, there
is a word for this direct, outdoor painting,
plein air,
the French term for “open air.”
It may seem strange from our present
perspective that painting outdoors was
not done, but that was generally the
case until the Barbizon artists.
The
extension of this plein air process becomes more significant because it is from
these Barbizon artists that the Impressionists
redefined the way painting would be
done in the future.
The
Reading Public Museum has a notable
collection of Barbizon School paintings,
including a substantial group by Díaz
de la Peña. Díaz de la
Peña was one of the leading artists
in the Barbizon movement, and was well
known to all of the Barbizon painters.
He first saw the Barbizon Region in
1836, which would be the primary location
of his work throughout his life. In
1837 he finished his first painting
of the area, The Forest of Fontainebleau
(numerous
paintings had this same title), which
was accepted into the Salon of Paris
that year.
