Kerri McNair Shares Thoughts on Elizabeth Jane Gardner Bouguereau
Kerri McNair is our events manager. She agreed to write about one of her favorite artists and portraits in our collection.
“La Confidence” caught my freshman attention on my very first visit to the Georgia Museum of Art. This painting is as tall as a person and shows a quiet secret shared between two women. Intriguing and distracting, the work of Elizabeth Jane Gardner is one of the most popular and striking works that hang in the museum.
Elizabeth Jane Gardner was a Parisian who happened to be born in Exeter, New Hampshire. Though she was raised and educated in the United States she loved, she died and perfected her craft in Paris. As was common with ambitious women in the 19th and early-20th centuries, Gardner continually butted her head against many glass ceilings. She applied to numerous art schools in France, never dissuaded by the fact that each one was an “all-male” institution. Until she was accepted at the Académie Julian at the age of 36, she took her rejections on the chin and continued to teach herself as best she could. When Gardner wasn’t dressing as a man to sneak into nude figure drawing classes, she was selling renditions of paintings by established male artists.
By the end of her life, Gardner’s work most resembled that of William-Adolphe Bouguereau — her long-time lover and eventual husband. She was quoted as saying, “I know I am censured for not more boldly asserting my individuality, but I would rather be known as the best imitator of Bouguereau than be nobody.” Gardner’s imitation makes her a perfect candidate for comparison. Noting and speculating upon the subtle differences between her art and that she copied may reveal insights into her mentality.
Gardner’s husband painted angels and young women, usually beautiful and smiling, and young girls, usually playing, drawing water or engaged other common activities. Perhaps because of this, Gardner’s own works were thought to encourage proper behavior in young women. At the Lucy Cobb Institute, an all-girls school on Milledge Avenue from 1859 to 1931, “La Confidence was” considered a jewel in the school’s collection and regarded to have a “moralizing purpose” for the student population. I believe, however, that Gardner takes her portraits of young women to another level. She paints women and girls sharing secrets, playing or perhaps pushing each other onto the ground, and I feel a depth to her work that sets her apart from her husband.
“The Bohemian” by Bouguereau and “Garde” by Gardner are a pair of often-compared works. In “The Bohemian,” a girl gazes at the viewer, cradling a violin as if she’s just finished playing. Church spires can be spotted in the background. The girl seems calm, if perhaps impatient to return to her instrument. This painting shows the influence of the romanticism on Bouguereau — it is an idyllic portrait of a young subject. “Garde,” on the other hand, shows a girl looking away from the viewer, perhaps lost in thought or disgruntled by an audience. She has retreated to an inner world. Her instrument hangs at her side, and behind her is a large body of water surrounded by cliffs.
If avant-garde refers to the delightfully experimental, then “Garde” must exemplify the suppression of that same phenomenon and the bolstering of tradition. The painting obviously pays homage to the Old Masters, but the dissatisfied subject suggests a restless internal monologue. Rather than a tragic beauty or quiet angel, this girl exudes an air of simplicity while her expression clues the viewer in to something more. “La Confidence” is the same. The subjects’ position suggests the sharing of a whimsical confession. It is clear the two share an acute camaraderie. The expression of the woman in front hints at a secret chamber of thought behind her eyes, one that we don’t have the privilege of entering.
Gardner consciously imitated male artists, both for the income the practice provided and because imitation became a medium in and of itself. For this reason, her paintings often entrance viewers, reminding them of the familiar while leaving them searching for a discrepancy that they can’t quite seem to grasp.