Lessons From Art: Choose For Yourself

Mint and spring green brush strokes crisscross the canvas, providing a blanket of color and texture for two figures: one in beige and the other in blue. This painting by Berthe Morisot of a young girl in beige (her daughter) with her nanny in a grassy landscape exudes a lusciousness that separates it from the other works in this exhibit at the Corcoran, but the caption alongside the canvas is provocative: the painting “reflects which subjects were ‘suitable’ for women artists.”

How does a person’s gender impact their decisions and preferences? Next to another painting in the exhibit, Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s “Conversation” showing a man and woman comfortably lounging in a verdant landscape, a caption explains “It is likely that the air of quiet intimacy that pervades the work appealed to the Davies sisters’ sensibilities.”

Do women approach collecting art differently from men and is there such thing as feminine sensibility? In a TIME essay in 1972, Robert Hughes asked “Who was more ‘feminine’ in paint handling, Renoir or Sonia Delaunay?” The paucity of women with art collections makes it cause for celebration when a gallery brings selections collected by two females. To emphasize the rarity, an exhibit on the same floor of the museum, drawing from the collection of William A. Clark and called “A Love of Europe,” exposes the different choices made by a man who was collecting similar works during the same time frame.

The first room of selections from Clark’s collection displays an ominous seascape with a large ship in the background and smaller vessel in the foreground: it is a grey and threatening scene by Joseph Mallord William Turner called “Boats Carrying Out Anchors…” In the exhibit of the Davies collection, six works by Turner share a softer, pastel palette. Their elements are more indicated than emphatic, suggesting fragile shapes and lines as in “The Leyen Burg at Gondorf.”

But these sisters, who inherited their fortune from their grandfather David Davies, a self-made man who profited from business in railways, coal-owning and dock construction, also defy the stereotypes: in which collection – Clark or Davies – would you expect to find a painting of ballet dancers by Edgar Degas? His “The Dance Class” of 1873 is part of Clark’s collection. There are few works of Parisian life in the Davies collection: “no bars, no opera, no ballet.”

One of the most recognizable works of the Davies collection is Renoir’s “La Parisienne,” a full-figure painting of the 17-year old actress Henriette Henriot which was presented in the Impressionist exhibit of 1874. It cost Gwendoline Davies £5,000 pounds in 1913.

The differences between the two exhibits beg the question: what artists have been overlooked because there are not more female collectors? The Davies sisters began collecting in 1908; women in the States did not receive the right to vote until 1920. The prescient thinking of the sisters – their ability to select works before others recognized their merits – is revealed at the Corcoran: Vincent Van Gogh’s “Rain – Auvers” was one of the first works by the artist to enter a British collection and Paul Cézanne’s “Midday at L’Estaque” was the first Cézanne to be displayed publicly in Britain.

A quote from Gwendoline Davies greets the visitor at the Corcoran: “The great joy of collecting anything is to do it yourself, with expert opinion granted, but one does like to choose for oneself.” Alongside the personal pleasures of selection, the exhibit of the Davies Collection sheds light on voices – and ideas - which are too often unconsidered.

“Turner to Cézanne” Masterpieces from the Davies Collection, National Museum Wales at the Corcoran Gallery of Art until April 25, 2010.