Female painters get their dues

Largely sidelined in the annals of art history, women were essentially excluded from artistic legitimacy until the end of the 19th century. Recent years have seen their work increasingly being honoured by museums, attempting to redress some of the balance.

In Paris, the name “Rosa Bonheur” is most commonly associated with a guinguette-style bar on the River Seine or in the Buttes Chaumont park. Few people know that it actually refers to an artist who was celebrated in her time for her animal paintings and landscapes.

Now, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in the French city of Bordeaux, her hometown, and Paris’ Musée d’Orsay want to remedy this through a major retrospective of her work, presented until 18 September in Bordeaux.

This exhibition honours an extraordinary, innovative and inspiring painter who chose to remain single and not have children.

On the other side of the Channel, the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London has chosen to pay homage to another painter who is little recognised alongside her colleagues of the Impressionist movement. Berthe Morisot was a contemporary of Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro.

The program includes paintings in which the artist explored several themes of modern life, such as the intimacy of bourgeois life, interest in gardens and female domestic chores.

London art fans will be able to discover, from April to September next year, 40 paintings by Morisot. Among them, a self-portrait she made in 1885, “Jeune Fille au Bal,” and “The Psyche Mirror.” All of them testify to her taste for light and pastel colours. –