Four Masterworks from the National Gallery of Art

Audio Guide

Audio Recording

Introduction

Four Masterworks from the National Gallery of Art

The four paintings on view are on long-term loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., as part of the National Gallery of Art’s “Across the Nation” program, to share the nation’s collection with museums across the country. Boise Art Museum is one of only ten organizations invited to participate in this unique program. This is a rare and welcome opportunity for our community to experience these significant and beloved artworks.

Organized by the Boise Art Museum

Berthe Morisot, Young Woman with a Straw Hat, 1884

Berthe Morisot
(1841-1895, b. Bourges, France, d. Paris, France)

Young Woman with a Straw Hat, 1884
oil on canvas
Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection

A woman wearing a straw-colored, brimmed hat, adorned with flowers, has been painted with layers of loose brushstrokes. She is shown in profile, from the waist up, looking to our right. Her reddish-blonde hair is visible beneath the brim of the hat, which is secured with a long piece of dark purple fabric tied in a large bow beneath her chin. Her long-sleeved white dress is accented with a light blue sash at her waist. Abstract blue and green brushstrokes cover the background of the image, with some pink and red-orange clusters of brushstrokes near the lower edge.

Thomas Eakins, Harriet Husson Carville (Mrs. James G. Carville), 1904

Thomas Eakins
(1844-1916, Philadelphia, PA)

Harriet Husson Carville (Mrs. James G. Carville), 1904
oil on canvas
Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of Elizabeth O. Carville

A portrait of a woman with upswept dark hair and brown eyes has been painted from the chest up, in a realistic style, with some brushstrokes still visible. Her face and gaze are turned slightly to our left, holding a neutral expression. She is wearing a white pleated top with a light purple sash around her neck. The initials “T. E.” appear in the upper left corner, against a mottled brown-grey background.

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1948

Mark Rothko
(1903-1970, b. Daugavpils, Latvia, d. New York, NY)

Untitled, 1948
oil and acrylic on canvas
Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc.

A nearly square abstract painting features a pastel orange background covered with a patchwork of soft, irregular shapes in light purple, dark purple, and cream. The edges of the shapes are blurred with visible brushstrokes. A handpainted, dashed purple line runs horizontally across the canvas in the upper third of the composition. Loose bright orange brushstrokes roughly create a small square area near the painting’s center.

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1950

Mark Rothko
(1903-1970, b. Daugavpils, Latvia, d. New York, NY)

Untitled, 1950
pigmented hide glue and oil on canvas
Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc.

A four-foot-wide abstract painting features a yellow rectangle across the upper third of the painting, resting on a dark brown rectangle, which makes up the lower two-thirds. The edges of the rectangles are loosely blurred with visible brushstrokes. An irregular, hand-painted white line traces the outer edges of the rectangles. These two shapes nearly fill the composition, apart from a narrow red border around all four sides of the painting.

Exhibition Handout

Four Masterworks from the National Gallery of Art

 

Berthe Morisot (1841-1895)

Born in Bourges, France, Berthe Morisot was a feminist icon who championed gender equality and became the first female member of the radical Impressionist movement. Morisot’s mother allowed her to study painting with Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot during a period when social conventions barred women from this type of education. In 1864, Morisot exhibited for the first time in the esteemed Salon de Paris, where she showed for a decade until she joined the “rejected” Impressionists in the first Salon des Refusés exhibition, a landmark event in the history of Impressionism. Members included

Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley — all males, except Morisot. The artist is notable for painting women in domestic interiors and capturing the important female perspective of women’s lives in the late 1800s. In 1890, Morisot wrote, “I don’t think there has ever been a man who treated a woman as an equal, and that’s all I would have asked for, for I know I’m worth as much as they.”

Image: Berthe Morisot, Young Woman with a Straw Hat, 1884, oil on canvas, Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection

 

Thomas Eakins (1844-1916)

Thomas Eakins, a pivotal American Realist painter, painted hundreds of portraits, usually of friends, family members, or prominent people in the arts, sciences, and religion. Born in Philadelphia, Eakins traveled to study in Paris, France, at the age of 22. He enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts and studied with the leading academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme. In the late 1870s, Eakins began teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he became a professor of drawing and painting in 1879. At that time, the artist was steadfast in his insistence on the importance of painting and teaching from the nude model. The controversy surrounding this practice led to a scandal and his dismissal from the professorship in 1886. Eakins’s paintings garnered little attention from the art world until after his death.

Image: Thomas Eakins, Harriet Husson Carville (Mrs. James G. Carville), 1904, oil on canvas, Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Elizabeth O. Carville

 

Mark Rothko (1903-1970)

Mark Rothko was the most influential Color Field painter in America. Born in what is now Latvia, Rothko moved to the United States at the age of ten. He studied at Yale University before pursuing his art career in New York. His early artwork was influenced by surrealism and abstraction. He eventually abandoned representational painting to focus on the emotive power of color. Rothko’s later paintings typically consist of soft, rectangular fields of color that hover on the canvas, inviting viewers to engage in contemplation and introspection. His method involved layering thin washes of pigment to give his colors a sense of luminosity and depth. For Rothko, art was not about representation or narrative, but was about conveying universal human emotions, such as joy, despair, and the search for meaning in life. He often spoke of his desire for his paintings to act as a spiritually transcendent experience.

Image: Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1950, pigmented hide glue and oil on canvas, Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc. © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Image: Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1948, oil and acrylic on canvas Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington Gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc. © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

 

Eakins | Morisot | Rothko

Thomas Eakins, Berthe Morisot, and Mark Rothko were all considered revolutionary and radical thinkers during the times they were making art. They were visionaries who challenged socially acceptable art practices and provoked their contemporary audiences with original ideas. They were instrumental in shifting each current art movement toward a new art movement —from Realism to Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism. They were inventors of art history.

 

About the Exhibition

The four paintings on view are on long-term loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., as part of the National Gallery of Art’s “Across the Nation” program, to share the nation’s collection with museums across the country. Boise Art Museum is one of only ten organizations invited to participate in this unique program. This is a rare and welcome opportunity for our community to experience these significant and beloved artworks.

Organized by the Boise Art Museum

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