museums as a young girl. But which one to choose? Despite all of the beauty of France, there was a country in Europe where all the artists, including the French, were searching for the roots of European art. Only in Italy did they find the authentic classical art whose effect on realism became especially evident in the works of Winkelman. Medieval Italian frescos taught them to understand the harmony of colours.
A Corner of the Loge
1879
Oil on canvas, 43.8 × 62.2 cm
Private Collection
At the Theatre
1879
Pastel on metallic paint on canvas, 65.1 × 81.3 cm
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The great masters of Italian Renaissance were role models for all artists, regardless of their artistic orientation. So Mary took the path everyone else had walked before. She began in Italy. “So I left for Italy and stayed in Parma for eight months, where I entered the school of Correggio, an extraordinary master!” Mary followed in the steps of her older French contemporaries, choosing old masters. “All of his charm,” Eugene Delacroix wrote of Correggio, “all his power and achievement of a genius, came from his imagination in order to awaken an echo in the imaginations created to understand it.”
Interior Scene
1879
Softground etching, aquatint and drypoint on cream laid paper, 39.7 × 31 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington D. C.
When Mary went to Parma in 1872, she was twenty-eight years old. She spent eight months there. “From there I left for Spain,” Mary related, “The works of Rubens at Museo Del Prado inspired in me such admiration that I hurried from Madrid to Antwerp.” It is not a bit surprising that Rubens fascinated her. In Madrid, Rome, and Antwerp, the city of Rubens, where his house still stands, Mary studied this great native of Flanders, whose art became a starting point for her French contemporaries. Delacroix called him “the most brilliant of painters”. When Mary was studying the works of a master, she did so thoughtfully and consistently.
A Woman and a Girl Driving
1881
Oil on canvas, 89.7 × 130.5 cm
The W. P. Wilstach Collection, Philadelphia Art Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
“I stayed there all summer long studying Rubens,” the artist related, “It was from Rome that I returned to Paris in 1874 in order to settle there permanently”. In April 1874, at 35 boulevard des Capucines, the first exhibition of the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, etc. took place. At that exhibition, Louis Le Roy, a critic from Le Charivari magazine, gave the new artists the name “Impressionists”. At the time, however, Mary did not yet pay enough attention to them. Despite her somewhat ironic attitude towards art teachers, Mary followed the path of other artists, and started to look for tutors – after all, future Impressionists spent time at the studio of Professor Charles Glaire! But how to choose a teacher? Perhaps her choice in this matter was not original either.
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