Marie Bracquemond: A forgotten female Impressionist painter

Rassouli introduces Marie Bracquemond, one of the three great ladies of Impressionism who included Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot. Although Marie Bracquemond was a superb painter, her works were ignored during her lifetime and even after because of her being a woman. Her first painting was accepted by the prestigious Salon des Beaux-Arts at the age of 17. She produced many commissioned portraits and made copies of paintings in the Louvre Museum during her early years. She later joined the Impressionists in three of their exhibitions. She is known for painting outdoors in nature.

Marie Bracquemond was married to classical painter and engraver Félix Bracquemond and had a son Pierre with him. She continued to paint in the style of the Impressionists Claude Monet and Edgar Degas. She met Paul Gauguin in1886 and brought the impoverished artist to live in her house. Gauguin had a decisive influence on her.
Marie Bracquemond’s husband refused to show her paintings to visitors, or even hang them on the walls of their home. This made her give up painting from the time she was 50 years old, except for doing a few private works. She did not paint much during the final 26 years of her life, and died at the age of 76 in 1916.

It was only during the 1970s when attention to women artists was increased, that the interest in the forgotten work of Marie Bracquemond was renewed. Marie Bracquemond’s works are presently held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, among others.
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