We are delighted to introduce Scottish Impressions: The Road from Glasgow to Bougival, a curatorial text by Elizabeth Frost Pierson, as a prime example of the services Longhouse provides.
When curating an event, Longhouse delivers a full range of bilingual content tailored to specific audiences, including invitations, press releases, curatorial texts, and exhibition panels. This commitment to accessible, cross-cultural engagement ensures that each project fosters meaningful dialogue.
By connecting Scotland's artistic heritage with the historical landscape of Bougival, this exhibition reflects our mission to inspire collaboration and deepen understanding through the arts.
A WINDOW OPEN ONTO NATURE: BOUGIVAL AND THE IMPRESSIONISTS
‘My very dear Berthe’, wrote Morisot’s close friend and fellow artist, the Duchess Adle Colonna who used the pseudonym ‘Marcello’. ‘I hope you are working and producing those paintings so true in their effects that they seem to be a window open onto nature’.
Our affinity for nature is genetic and deep-rooted in evolution. Being in nature promotes spiritual well-being, gives clarity to the mind and a connection to something greater than ourselves. Dwelling in nature inspires creativity. The Impressionists knew this, even if they didn’t know they knew this, experiencing a deep connection to the natural world that they translated and expressed in their art sur le motif. In a famous pamphlet of the day, art critic and champion of Impressionism Louis Edmond Duranty explained the movement’s relationship with the nature, and consequent schism away from a more conservative and realistic tradition of ar thus: ‘If having been dark it becomes light, if from black it becomes white, if from depth it resurfaces, if from pliant it becomes taut.., you’ve seen enough to learn there’s a spirit here…that has opened itself to the light.’
Nowhere is this emphasis on expressing the natural world more pronounced in the work of the Impressionists than in their relationship with the river. The river inspired their paintings and provided them with a vibrant and manifold subject for exploration. Often associated with life, fertility and abundance, rivers have sustained human and animal life for millennia. People attach strong religious, social, and mythological attachments to rivers, the Seine no exception with the nymph lady Sequanna standing guard over the source. While no two rivers are alike, each is nourished by similar sources - rainwater, groundwater, and tributaries. The point where a tributary meets the mainstream is called the confluence.
Bougival - a hilly, open and flowered suburb just west of Paris with mediaeval origins - has, since the 10th Century, been a small but important town. City of water, Louis XIV built the Machine of Marly there to transport water from the Seine to the gardens of Versailles. The introduction of a train line in the 19th Century opened up a pathway for Parisians to travel back and forth, and many established summer homes there.
At the end of the 19th Century Bougival became a magnet for the great intellectuals and artists of the day who gravitated there like tributaries in a confluence of energy, creativity and innovation. Inspired by the abundance of nature around them and the movement, light and sound of the river, the early Impressionists’ shared rebellion against the status quo was unprecedented and historically unique. Artists such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissaro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Paul Cézanne, and Edgar Degas to name but a few - all found inspiration in nature alongside other painters who sought to capture its essence in their canvases. The writer Ivan Tourgenev and his muse - opera singer Pauline Viardot - kept homes in Bougival, hosting luminaries such as Guy de Maupassant, George Sand, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Stéphane Mallarmé, Maurice Maeterlinck, Frédéric Chopin and Émile Zola. Composers Georges Bizet wrote his celebrated opera Carmen in his riverside home, Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy, whose music was particularly inspired by water, came to Bougival..
BERTHE MORISOT: NATURE, IMPRESSIONISM, WOMEN AND CHILDREN
Berthe Morisot was at the epicentre of this group. Her strength and fierce independence were trademark characteristics and her commitment to her work - along with a devotion to her friendships with her fellow artists - and gave her a prominent role in the development and continuation of the Impressionist movement. A great light for those who sought it also in their paintings, Morisot was - extraordinarily for the time - on equal footing with the artist Édouard Manet, both socially and professionally. Manet was fascinated with her and painted her frequently. She in turn admired and respected his work. They became in-laws when she married his brother, described by Fabienne Brugère with just one word - ‘Marisot’. Never wavering in her committment Morisot drew the other artists into her orb and while the lines in her paintings became more blurred kept them all in sharp focus. With tempers flaring within the movement, and organisation not always being at its best, Morisot stepped in to placate and guide them all forward, remarkable especially given the times in a male-dominated world where bourgeois women were expected to stay at home with the children. She committed herself to their cause with a grace and persistence that she became known for, and they in turn admired her for these qualities in addition to her talent. Her contribution cannot be underestimated.
The rivers and its banks, and all of the flora and fauna that surrounded it, proved galvanising to Morisot and to the others in the group, a sort of call to artistic arms with the focus purposefully shifted away from realism. Her early studies with Corot, training that her contemporaries did not share, may have some significance in the unfettered freedom she clearly felt while wielding her brush.
The emphasis that Morisot placed on themes of women and children in nature became a hallmark of her œuvre, Painting en plein air was not as straightforward for the 19th Century woman as it was for men. Women were not free to travel unchaperoned,, and certainly not alone in the countryside, so the tradition of landscape painting gave way to more domestic moments of interiors, or children at play with family and close friends. Her influence is palpable within the paintings and work of artists around Europe, most especially the Scottish Impressionists, all of whom echoed her depictions of intimate scenes such as that between a mother and her young daughter immersed in a field of flowers. Work that had previously been concerned with more classical subject matter gave way to notions of how light could define a moment in time, or what emotions could be captured with faster and fewer brushstrokes.
Morisot’s interest in the expression of feelings and emotions was equally as revolutionary as the shift in styles. As Morisot wrote, ‘It is important to express oneself - provided the deep feelings are real, and are taken from your own experience.’
This focus on women and children in nature is relevant now more than ever, and can be understood not only in the context of the late 19th Century but in contemporary life as well. Then there was turmoil and war, with a direct and marked turn away from it - out of necessity - towards nature, domestic life, and the intimate scenes of mothers and their children amidst a complete immersion in the natural world. Now - at a time when the world is again beset with war, and when issues around global warming and sustainability are so critical - a focus on nature has become an essential. Women - depicted in Morisot's paintings as the nurturers and mothers, a nod to our matrilineal history and symbolic of life itself - are today increasingly assuming leadership roles around the world, achieving long-overdue recognition for their contribution to and place in society. Children, as seen in the paintings of Morisot as well as her artistic successors, take on new meaning, representing as they do higher notions of purity and innocence, and a hope for the future. Images of children in nature have a grounding and importance that transcends the mere anecdotal and that is elevated to the most fundamental aspects of life. They are as worthy subjects now, in today’s world, as they were then.
While the larger group of Impressionist artists became known predominantly for their vibrant and freely painted landscapes, it is within these domestic scenes of children in nature, and the women that cared for them, that Morisot excelled. In the summers she spent in Bougival she worked steadily, producing many paintings of her beloved daughter Julie and house and garden, where she found much joy. Her subjects were rendered with sensitivity and candour which deepened through her direct experience of motherhood when her daughter Julie was born and that is reflected in her earlier drawings and sketches. Capturing the essence of her subjects, employing oils, watercolours and pastels simultaneously in her paintings as she developed, Morisot infused her paintings with a vibration of colour that exuded an energy described by Duranty as ‘a summary, calligraphic, and colour-saturated notation of transient light effects.’
SCOTTISH IMPRESSIONISM: THE GLASGOW BOYS AND GIRLS
The end of the 19th century was a complex and tense time around the world. In France the Franco-Prussian war had left people blistered and traumatised, triggering upheavals that drove military and civilian sentiment amid the new and emerging nationalism that ultimately became a turning point for Europe. Images of the day show a desecrated city of Paris, and the retreat to nature can be understood in psychological terms as much as by the artistic movement that it became. Images of the countryside for collectors and artists alike - with their more vibrant colours and free brushwork - were effectively an emotional antidote to the chaos and violence the French people had recently experienced.
It was in this atmosphere that the Impressionists, along with Morisot - who never wavered in her commitment to the avant-garde and her desire for greater artistic freedom - joined the first independent exhibition of Impressionists in 1894 held at the studio of the photographer Nadar.
The dramatic effect that this small (and at the time reviled) show created was nothing less than an artistic earthquake of seismic proportions. Described by many as the first truly modern art movement in history, one that beyond a doubt paved the way for the modernist art that has followed since, Impressionism drew people to it from around the world. The artistic and intellectual movement that flowered around the city of Bougival, combined with this broader Impressionist movement as a whole, reverberated far beyond the confines of the idyllic river town and France.
Nowhere was this influence felt more strongly than in Europe. Scotland during this time was experiencing a harsh economic depression, and many of its artists - unlike the English painters of the time - were keen to explore and expand on the artistic influence of the continent. While some travelled to London to make a living, establishing careers as successful portrait painters, those who travelled abroad, specifically to French soil, found solace on the banks of the Seine where they admired the radical new art that was being created. Though it took almost 15 years for the movement’s influence to feel its full impact, through their travels and the work they produced the Scottish artists were to become highly regarded in France as well as in Germany, where they participated in several exhibitions in the 1890’s.
Concurrently, the late 19th century also saw a new generation of enormously successful Scottish entrepreneurs whose wealth had been accumulated at a time when Glasgow was a major industrial city, one of the largest in the world and - after London - the second great metropolis of the British Empire. Building extravagant mansions they followed the American new rich in decorating their homes with major contemporary works of art. Their tastes were generally conservative and inclined towards the fashionable Barbizon and Hague schools but it was the Glasgow based dealer Alexander Reid who - while still catering to their more conventional demands - introduced the work of the more radical contemporary French painters to Scotland. There in his Glasgow gallery he exposed his clients to the works of Monet, Sisley, Renoir, Pissaro and, on one occasion, Berthe Morisot.
Exposure to the work of their more radical French counterparts not surprisingly caught the imagination of that generation of Scottish artists, along with them the ‘Glasgow Boys and Girls’. The Glasgow Boys and Girls were a collective of around 20 painters from diverse backgrounds, bound together by friendship. Centred in Glasgow, they lived, joined studios, painted and exchanged artistic ideas. Although they lacked a formal manifesto they had a common goal: to challenge the prevailing Academicism in art and resist the conventions imposed by the Royal Scottish Academy.
Keeping within the well established, deep-rooted and historic landscape tradition in Scottish art, while still painting portraits and interiors as well, The Glasgow Boys and Girls began to move away from the often grey and gloomy palette that so often reflected the reality of Scottish weather to a brighter, freer and livelier style that looked directly to the work of their French contemporaries. If their early work had been influenced by French and Dutch Realism, by the late 1880s the group began to develop a style akin to Impressionism. (Although at the time the term ‘Impressionist’ was considered an insult, in response to the Societé Anonyme exhibition of 1874.) A shared artistic rebellion against the status quo - along with the inspiration they found with the distinctive technique of Jules Bastien-Lepage, whose use of square brushes and painting en plein air, and in smaller formats with vitesse was a revelation - they began setting up artist colonies in France. This altered their course forever more, and they subsequently became known for their vibrant use of colour, intricate patterns, and rich textures that was such a marked departure from artistic norms.
Like their European counterparts their focus on everyday life and rural characters marked a significant departure from traditional subjects, reflecting their commitment to capturing the essence of daily life. The influence of Japanese art incorporated the more flattened forms of Japanese prints into their work and like Morisot and her fellow impressionists they developed a keen interest in the emotional capacity of their subjects and how to express not just form and light, but the feelings they provoke as well. The influence of Morisot in their more domestic scenes of women and children is palpable, as seen in this exhibition, and their references to her sharp focus on these subjects within a natural setting stands out.
Chroniclers of modern life, and on to their years of international fame,The Glasgow Boys and Girls are considered some of the most important painters of the 19th Century. Their association with the early Impressionists brought them national and international fame and established their avant-garde credentials as radical artists who had disassociated themselves from a more conventional approach to art. The Impressionist movement inspired their work and infused it with the same emotional candour and looseness of brushstroke as their French counterparts. Scottish Impressionists captured and harnessed this new art in their canvases with an exuberance and freedom that could not have previously been imagined let alone expressed.
It is because of them that Glasgow holds some of the richest treasures of Impressionist art today.
MAISON BERTHE MORISOT
The Maison Berthe Morisot dedicates its existence to the extraordinary life of an extraordinary woman. Icon, feminist, rebel with a brush and a cause - the magnet that was Morisot was like a centrifugal pull at a time when artists needed an outlet and a unifier. Morisot’s own words sum up the woman and the artist so well: ‘Art has the power to transport us to another world, to make the ordinary extraordinary.’ In every way Morisot herself was extraordinary. She was independent enough to remain unmarried far beyond the conventions of the day, and at a time when no female artist was expected to make a living out of it, she asserted her freedom to bring a singular style of painting with new subjects to the world. Morisot holds her place in the annals of the development of modern art and remains among one of the most important female artists in history. Maison Berthe Morisot offers its visitors a journey through both the physical and the digital realms of her house and garden, with education and experience at the core. Special attention has been given to ensuring that the visit and programs are accessible and engaging for young audiences. Berthe’s Brush at Bougival, a game developed by The Cornelius Arts Foundation, Longhouse and Impactoverse, reinforces this commitment.
THE FLEMING COLLECTION
The collection of the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation (FWAF) is significant not only in its size and range, but also because it allows us to understand directly how these contemporary artistic cross-currents so excited the painterly imagination in Glasgow’s golden age. Scotland and France had long been allied and it is no surprise that the ancient links that had once placed Scotland’s queen on the throne of France led these painters - in the vanguard of the new Scottish renaissance - to look first to Paris rather than to London for their inspiration.
The leading collection of Scottish Art outside of a public institution, FWAF maintains cultural diplomacy as one of its central pillars and charitable goals. Through the public loaning of artwork and its promotion at exhibitions, in print and on-line, as well as through a range of educational initiatives, FWAF aims to strengthen relationships and the shared values of cultures and nations by inspiring dialalogue that fosters understanding of the art and creativity of Scotland.
LONGHOUSE
Longhouse is a boutique partnership-building consultancy harnessing the vibrancy of the arts in the service of cross-cultural diplomacy, business convergence and political empowerment. Women-led, the Longhouse work model uses cross-sectoral exchanges, forums, workshops and exhibitions to create and enhance institutional alliances and democratic understanding.
One of the central pillars of the Fleming-Wyfold Collection is that of ‘cultural diplomacy’. In exhibitions around the globe they embrace the tenet that the public loaning of artworks inspire understanding and deepen relationships. Longhouse is dedicated to promoting the arts and cultural exchange through multi-sectoral events with impact that heighten an awareness of the issues our world is facing today. With the Maison Berthe Morisot, our commitment to an engagement in and celebration of education, nature and sustainability, creativity and artistic expression form our core values that we happily share in equal parts. These values are our unifiers, like tributaries coalescing together to form a confluence in the mainstream.
The coalescence of energy and dedication that has come together, like tributaries, to create this exhibition is the result, among others, of four people and the institutions they represent. First, the efforts of Christine Dezaunay and her colleagues at the Mairie of Bougival are remarkable for their persistence in bringing to fruition the opening of this groundbreaking project. Second, Theodore Albano offered a profound connection to the Glasgow Boys & Girls and provided us with the works you see today from the extraordinary Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation. Third, Elizabeth Frost Pierson, Founder of Longhouse, has been a great asset with decades of experience in the art world, whose grounding in and affection for the Bougival region has fueled our mission. Last, Marianne Magnin, Founder of Longhouse whose vision and clarity of purpose have guided the whole from start to finish. Her leadership in the development of the Cornelius Arts Foundation (TCAF) and the innovative work at Gingko lab. are compelling. Without her none of this would have been possible.
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