{Academic}
While the similarities between Kerr’s Portrait of Betty Jane Kimbark (Kim Ondaatje at age of 10) and Vigée’s Marie Antoinette with a Rose in artist, subject and history are noteworthy, it is their akin capturing of their subjects’ defying societal expectations and empowering addressing of the observer, and, comprising of visuals signifying decadence selected and rendered to be a balance between two contrasting artistic sensibilities, that I take as the topic of this essay.
A young girl’s hollow stare bores through the canvas of Estelle Muriel Kerr’s Portrait of Betty Jane Kimbark (Kim Ondaatje at age of 10) (1938), her made up face and coiffured ringlets, deep emerald velvet dress, fur manchon and feathered fascinator and bubblegum pink with floral lace details backdrop, making her look like a doll in a dollhouse. A young woman’s tender gaze enchants the observer of Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun’s Marie Antoinette with a Rose (1783), her powdered skin and piled high hair, pressed violet robe à la française with frill trim, feathered silk turban and pearls and baby pink cabbage rose garden setting, giving her the appearance of a queen in a castle. Kerr was a celebrated child portraitist in Toronto in the first half of the 20th century (Butlin 228), and Vigée Le Brun was a renowned portraitist of European (but for most of her career French) royals and elites in the last half of the 18th century and into the 19th century (Smith).
Kerr studied under Canadian Impressionist painters, Mary Ella Dignam and Laura Muntz Lyall, and practiced at the The Art Students League of New York (in New York City) and the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris; from her teachings, she developed a style that mixed Impressionism and Neoclassicism (“Kerr, Estelle Muriel”). Vigée was given instruction by her father Louis Vigée, a pastel portraitist, as well as French painters, Gabriel François Doyen, Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Claude-Joseph Vernet (and would go on to attend Paris’ Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture); her style, was a melding of the Rococo and Neoclassical styles (Smith). While their educations in the arts and the hybridity of movements of their styles are alike, the social conditions in which the women respectively, built their careers greatly differed: Toronto in the early 1900s was a growing place in a time of development, while France in the late 1700s was a place in crisis during a time of revolution.
The portraits’ subjects, Betty Jane Kimbark; a girl beginning to come of age from a family made wealthy off of their local dealings (Tostevin 35); and Marie Antoinette; a queen whose husband ignored the financial crisis in France and opposed democratic financial reforms and, who was despised by French revolutionaries for her extravagant spending; are coincidentally, symbolic of the national periods during which the portraits were completed. Likewise, the portraits’ journeys to the museums in which they are on display in the present – Betty’s from her parent’s residence, to her possession, to the Art Gallery of Ontario (as a gift of hers) (Wall text for Portrait) and Marie’s from the palace of Versailles, to the property of Paris, to the possession of most likely a former purveyor to the court of King Louis XVI (her husband) or one of his cabinetmakers (“Versailles After the French”), to the possession of King Louise-Philippe I, and to the museum of Versailles (“Marie-Antoinette, reine de”) – are representative, respectively, of growth and development and, of crisis and revolution. While the similarities between Kerr’s Portrait of Betty Jane Kimbark (Kim Ondaatje at age of 10) and Vigée’s Marie Antoinette with a Rose in artist, subject and history are noteworthy, it is their akin capturing of their subjects’ defying societal expectations and empowering addressing of the observer, and, comprising of visuals signifying decadence selected and rendered to be a balance between two contrasting artistic sensibilities, that I take as the topic of this essay.
How Kimbark and Antoinette are positioned in the portraits differ, as they are being informed by different references: Kerr takes as her reference, Laura Muntz Lyall’s portraits of young girls, (done from 1891-1915) and Vigée, Hyacinthe Rigaud’s portraits of French royalty (done from 1680-1740). Canadian Impressionist Lyall, often painted young girls up close to capture the essences of their personalities and convey the truths of their inner emotional lives (Atanassova), while Catalan-French Baroque Rigaud, had a custom of painting the royalty from afar to capture all of the significant connotative (frequently, of patriotism) symbols on their person as well as in the background (“Hyacinthe Rigaud: 1659-1743”). Lyall’s girls were encouraged to look at her while they were being painted as a form of their asserting their agency and announcing their presence (Atanassova), and it was a convention for Rigaud’s royalty to have their eyes looking through the canvas – at any potential observer – to reinforce their status (as the ‘watcher’, not the ‘watched’) and strengthen their image in the observers’ minds. The result of Kerr’s recreating Lyall’s iconography is Betty’s addressing of the observer inherits identical attributes to Lyall’s girls’, and likewise, Vigée’s recreating Rigaud’s (predominantly male) royalty’s confronting the observer’s eye, attaches such’s connotations to Marie’s doing the same.
Betty and Marie are placed similarly on the canvas; in the centre, occupying a majority of the space; to connote these ideals of power, independence and strength, however, how, they occupy this space, differs. Kimbark’s body faces the observer, her shoulders are straight, her hands are clasped in front of her and she stares emptily at the painter; Antoinette’s body leans right towards a cabbage rose bush, her hands hold a single cabbage rose, her head is turned to greet the observer and she looks warmly at the painter. Though they are fairly dissimilar, both of these poses signify the same meanings: defiance of the rigid expectations placed on Betty and Marie, and empowerment, the seizing back of control over their own identities. Such significations require a bit more knowledge of Betty Jane Kimbark and Marie Antoinette: the former’s portrait was commissioned to be displayed as an icon of the young girl for visitors of her family’s home to regard (Wall text for Portrait), and the latter’s portrait was made to shift the French citizens’ perception of the queen, upon its presentation to the public at a salon (Herrera).
Betty’s parents ordered her identity to be that which is personified by the cosmetics she has on, the clothing she wears and the background she stands against in her portrait, but in truth, her identity was that ideal’s antithesis (Wall text for Portrait). Her mannequin-like posture and the lifelessness of her gaze, betray the façade of Betty’s performance of that ideal. By not playing the part of her parents’ ideal daughter believably, by allowing the unnaturalness and mechanicalness of her performance of that girl to leak through, Betty is challenging her parents’ demands for her to be that girl in reality. To the people of France, by that point in her rule as queen, Marie’s identity was understood to be an extravagant and scandalous hedonist, an unfaithful wife and a neglectful mother, and a betrayer of the French people, due to how out of touch with the issues affecting their lives, she was. To counter this misperception, Vigée’s portrait represents Marie as she perceived herself: she is working in the garden (she labours, she is not lazy); she favours nature (she is grounded, she is not prissy or materialistic); she is domestic; and she looks at the observer with tenderness (she embraces, invites and cherishes all). She interrupts and argues against contemporary French society’s narrative about her, by highlighting one of her actual greatest interests which diverges from this narrative; in doing so, she takes control of the construction of her identity.
The ideological meanings of Portrait of Betty Jane Kimbark (Kim Ondaatje at age of 10) and Marie Antoinette with a Rose, are largely, that their subjects’ deviate internally, from either their external selves (in Betty’s case) or perceptions based off of their external selves (in Marie’s case). Many of the visuals included in the portraits of both Betty and Marie, nonetheless, signify the essence of the identity that Betty performs and the identity of Marie in the eyes of the French citizens’; to a great extent, it is Betty’s disconnection from how she appears in the portrait, and Marie’s acting in the portrait, in opposition to how she appears, that connote such ideological meanings. Both Kimbark and Antoinette, are symbols of opulence – as they appear, they are representative of the elite, and the royal, respectively. From a plastic perspective, each subject’s portrait, signifies richness. The observer’s eye enters the portraits through both subject’s eyes, but after that, it travels from one symbol of their class to the next. From Betty’s eyes, their upwards’ momentum moves our eye up to her hat; it then falls, following the gravity of her curls’ down past her made up face to her dress; it takes in her dress, eventually landing on her manchon; the horizontality of her manchon encourages it to move horizontally across the bottom of the canvas; the frame’s vertical lines motivate it to move upwards, along them, taking in the decorative background for the first time. From Marie’s eyes, the upwards tilt of their glance pushes our eye towards her hair and her hat; the downwards pointing of her hat’s feathers gestures it down to her pearls and her decolletage; It takes in her bodice, then follows her arms to the plucked cabbage rose; the rose’s stem points to her dress’s skirt so it goes there; her dress’ skirt points towards the planted and upkept bush of cabbage roses; from there, due the bush’s left-and-upwards momentum it travels to the flourishing, sculpted tree; it moves from the tree’s trunk to its foliage.
The colours of these symbols of wealth, add to their connotations of decadence as well: the gold of Betty’s ringlets and the rouge of her makeup, the deep emerald of her dress, manchon and hat, and the conch shell pink of the mural and the ivory and rose of its details; the creams of Marie’s turban and its feathers, the silver of her hair and the alabaster and rouge of her makeup, the pressed violet of her dress and the ivory of its lace and ribbons, the chartreuse and blush of the cabbage rose bush and the hazelnut and peacock green of the tree. The striking complementary contrast between the cool greens of Betty’s sumptuous garments and the warm pinks of her ornate space communicates drama, and the powerful contrast between the lightness of the hues of Marie’s extravagant appearance and the intensity of the colours of her cultivated surrounding communicates dynamism, both of which, contribute to the ‘rich’ qualities of the portraits.
Portrait of Betty Jane Kimbark (Kim Ondaatje at age of 10) was done in Kerr’s established style, a mixture of Impressionism and Neoclassicism, and Marie Antoinette with a Rose was completed in Vigée’s iconic style, Neoclassicism incorporated into Rococo. Impressionism renders subjects in relation to movement and dynamism, while Neoclassicism aims to capture subjects’ austerely, to grasp their quiddity; the two movements conflict in their aspirations and techniques, but Kerr blends them by applying Impressionist techniques in a way which succeeds in the aspirations of Neoclassicism. Kerr ‘builds’ her painting out of ‘broken’ lines of mixed and unmixed colour placed mostly beside and occasionally on top (as in Betty’s hair, the buttons on her dress, the lights of her hat and the floral wall art) of each other. These lines naturally form both organic (ex. the curls of her hair, the lace of her collar, the feather in her hat, the flowers and leaves behind her) and geometric (her hat, her dress’ buttons, her dress and its texture, the painted ribbon of lace behind her) shapes. The accumulation of these shapes creates Betty and the background: the shapes fuse together, and from a distance, the wholeness and stability of the real Betty and what she is standing in front of, are presented. More than developing a portrait that is representational, Kerr’s capturing of her subject material is symmetrical, harmonious, naturalistic and self-effacing.
Rococo’s ambition is to depict subjects through a lens which emphasizes or adds to their theatricality (their drama, excess, fantasy), while as considered, Neoclassicism intends to render subjects according to principles of aesthetics and realism; Vigée evokes Rococo by capturing through Neoclassicism’s aesthetic and realist principles, theatrical subject matter. Vigée’s portrait is essentially, a photograph: she paints Marie Antoinette holding a cabbage rose in a garden of Versailles as it is occurring in front of her. Marie Antoinette – looking like the embodiment of the Rococo essence and displaying its characteristics of ornamentation, curvedness and softness – and the garden – a recurring setting in Rococo art and comprising of waving lines and billowiness – are inherently Rococo. Vigée translates her ‘Rococo’ in real life, subject matter into a work of Neoclassicism. Balance, order, reason, restraint and clarity – the fundamentals of the Neoclassical approach to art – are not just evident in, but govern, the artist’s portrait.
Upon first glance there is a stasis and a oneness to Kerr’s Portrait of Betty Jane Kimbark (Kim Ondaatje at age of 10) and Vigée’s Marie Antoinette with a Rose: the girl and the young woman are carefully posed and placed into their settings – beautiful models, in beautiful costumes, in beautiful locations. On the surface, all of the visual cues work to reinforce a set of themes – beauty, status and wealth; the sumptuous palettes of the works bleed these themes, and as the eye digests the scenes, these themes are consistently in play. Someone with a background in art history might have the idea that Kerr’s and Vigée’s works signify stasis and oneness challenged for them, once they perceive the heterogeneity of the art movements that are found within them, the push-and-pull between Impressionism and Neoclassicism in Kerr’s case, and between Neoclassicism and Rococo in Vigée’s.
Upon a closer inspection, the ugliness of the first portrait – Betty Jane Kimbark’s hollow eyes and lifeless body – and the masculinity of the second portrait – Marie Antoinette’s protective stare and capable stance – complicate the ‘simple’ signification that the paintings appear to have. Whether the references for Betty’s or Marie’s looking at the observer are known, that there is a boldness and a determination in their doing so, that confronting the observer to put forth a point (like Betty) or upholding dominance in the interaction with the observer as a form of power (like Marie) are in the portraits, deepens everything that the portraits represent by multiple levels. Betty, with her mechanical posture, looks like a mannequin, while Marie, standing powerful amidst nature’s bounty, looks like a king; their posed-ness and their placed-ness contain significations against the rules and pressures placed on them, and the expectations and misperceptions of them. Portrait of Betty Jane Kimbark (Kim Ondaatje at age of 10) by Estelle Muriel Kerr and Marie Antoinette with a Rose by Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun are not beautiful paintings of beautiful rich girls: they are works of empowerment, protesting the accepted and perpetuated mistreatment and abuse of young women, made in incompatible time periods and in disparate locations.
the privilege and pressures of the rich girl experience: the portraits of betty jane kimbark (by estelle muriel kerr) and marie antoinette (by elisabeth louise vigée le brun) A young girl’s hollow stare bores through the canvas of Estelle Muriel Kerr’s Portrait of Betty Jane Kimbark (Kim Ondaatje at age of 10) (1938), her made up face and coiffured ringlets, deep emerald velvet dress, fur manchon and feathered fascinator and bubblegum pink with floral lace details backdrop, making her look like a doll in a dollhouse. A young woman’s tender gaze enchants the observer of Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun’s Marie Antoinette with a Rose (1783), her powdered skin and piled high hair, pressed violet robe à la française with frill trim, feathered silk turban and pearls and baby pink cabbage rose garden setting, giving her the appearance of a queen in a castle. Kerr was a celebrated child portraitist in Toronto in the first half of the 20th century (Butlin 228), and Vigée Le Brun was a renowned portraitist of European (but for most of her career French) royals and elites in the last half of the 18th century and into the 19th century (Smith). Kerr studied under Canadian Impressionist painters, Mary Ella Dignam and Laura Muntz Lyall, and practiced at the The Art Students League of New York (in New York City) and the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris; from her teachings, she developed a style that mixed Impressionism and Neoclassicism (“Kerr, Estelle Muriel”). Vigée was given instruction by her father Louis Vigée, a pastel portraitist, as well as French painters, Gabriel François Doyen, Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Claude-Joseph Vernet (and would go on to attend Paris’ Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture); her style, was a melding of the Rococo and Neoclassical styles (Smith). While their educations in the arts and the hybridity of movements of their styles are alike, the social conditions in which the women respectively, built their careers greatly differed: Toronto in the early 1900s was a growing place in a time of development, while France in the late 1700s was a place in crisis during a time of revolution. The portraits’ subjects, Betty Jane Kimbark; a girl beginning to come of age from a family made wealthy off of their local dealings (Tostevin 35); and Marie Antoinette; a queen whose husband ignored the financial crisis in France and opposed democratic financial reforms and, who was despised by French revolutionaries for her extravagant spending; are coincidentally, symbolic of the national periods during which the portraits were completed. Likewise, the portraits’ journeys to the museums in which they are on display in the present – Betty’s from her parent’s residence, to her possession, to the Art Gallery of Ontario (as a gift of hers) (Wall text for Portrait) and Marie’s from the palace of Versailles, to the property of Paris, to the possession of most likely a former purveyor to the court of King Louis XVI (her husband) or one of his cabinetmakers (“Versailles After the French”), to the possession of King Louise-Philippe I, and to the museum of Versailles (“Marie-Antoinette, reine de”) – are representative, respectively, of growth and development and, of crisis and revolution. While the similarities between Kerr’s Portrait of Betty Jane Kimbark (Kim Ondaatje at age of 10) and Vigée’s Marie Antoinette with a Rose in artist, subject and history are noteworthy, it is their akin capturing of their subjects’ defying societal expectations and empowering addressing of the observer, and, comprising of visuals signifying decadence selected and rendered to be a balance between two contrasting artistic sensibilities, that I take as the topic of this essay. How Kimbark and Antoinette are positioned in the portraits differ, as they are being informed by different references: Kerr takes as her reference, Laura Muntz Lyall’s portraits of young girls, (done from 1891-1915) and Vigée, Hyacinthe Rigaud’s portraits of French royalty (done from 1680-1740). Canadian Impressionist Lyall, often painted young girls up close to capture the essences of their personalities and convey the truths of their inner emotional lives (Atanassova), while Catalan-French Baroque Rigaud, had a custom of painting the royalty from afar to capture all of the significant connotative (frequently, of patriotism) symbols on their person as well as in the background (“Hyacinthe Rigaud: 1659-1743”). Lyall’s girls were encouraged to look at her while they were being painted as a form of their asserting their agency and announcing their presence (Atanassova), and it was a convention for Rigaud’s royalty to have their eyes looking through the canvas – at any potential observer – to reinforce their status (as the ‘watcher’, not the ‘watched’) and strengthen their image in the observers’ minds. The result of Kerr’s recreating Lyall’s iconography is Betty’s addressing of the observer inherits identical attributes to Lyall’s girls’, and likewise, Vigée’s recreating Rigaud’s (predominantly male) royalty’s confronting the observer’s eye, attaches such’s connotations to Marie’s doing the same. Betty and Marie are placed similarly on the canvas; in the centre, occupying a majority of the space; to connote these ideals of power, independence and strength, however, how, they occupy this space, differs. Kimbark’s body faces the observer, her shoulders are straight, her hands are clasped in front of her and she stares emptily at the painter; Antoinette’s body leans right towards a cabbage rose bush, her hands hold a single cabbage rose, her head is turned to greet the observer and she looks warmly at the painter. Though they are fairly dissimilar, both of these poses signify the same meanings: defiance of the rigid expectations placed on Betty and Marie, and empowerment, the seizing back of control over their own identities. Such significations require a bit more knowledge of Betty Jane Kimbark and Marie Antoinette: the former’s portrait was commissioned to be displayed as an icon of the young girl for visitors of her family’s home to regard (Wall text for Portrait), and the latter’s portrait was made to shift the French citizens’ perception of the queen, upon its presentation to the public at a salon (Herrera). Betty’s parents ordered her identity to be that which is personified by the cosmetics she has on, the clothing she wears and the background she stands against in her portrait, but in truth, her identity was that ideal’s antithesis (Wall text for Portrait). Her mannequin-like posture and the lifelessness of her gaze, betray the façade of Betty’s performance of that ideal. By not playing the part of her parents’ ideal daughter believably, by allowing the unnaturalness and mechanicalness of her performance of that girl to leak through, Betty is challenging her parents’ demands for her to be that girl in reality. To the people of France, by that point in her rule as queen, Marie’s identity was understood to be an extravagant and scandalous hedonist, an unfaithful wife and a neglectful mother, and a betrayer of the French people, due to how out of touch with the issues affecting their lives, she was. To counter this misperception, Vigée’s portrait represents Marie as she perceived herself: she is working in the garden (she labours, she is not lazy); she favours nature (she is grounded, she is not prissy or materialistic); she is domestic; and she looks at the observer with tenderness (she embraces, invites and cherishes all). She interrupts and argues against contemporary French society’s narrative about her, by highlighting one of her actual greatest interests which diverges from this narrative; in doing so, she takes control of the construction of her identity. The ideological meanings of Portrait of Betty Jane Kimbark (Kim Ondaatje at age of 10) and Marie Antoinette with a Rose, are largely, that their subjects’ deviate internally, from either their external selves (in Betty’s case) or perceptions based off of their external selves (in Marie’s case). Many of the visuals included in the portraits of both Betty and Marie, nonetheless, signify the essence of the identity that Betty performs and the identity of Marie in the eyes of the French citizens’; to a great extent, it is Betty’s disconnection from how she appears in the portrait, and Marie’s acting in the portrait, in opposition to how she appears, that connote such ideological meanings. Both Kimbark and Antoinette, are symbols of opulence – as they appear, they are representative of the elite, and the royal, respectively. From a plastic perspective, each subject’s portrait, signifies richness. The observer’s eye enters the portraits through both subject’s eyes, but after that, it travels from one symbol of their class to the next. From Betty’s eyes, their upwards’ momentum moves our eye up to her hat; it then falls, following the gravity of her curls’ down past her made up face to her dress; it takes in her dress, eventually landing on her manchon; the horizontality of her manchon encourages it to move horizontally across the bottom of the canvas; the frame’s vertical lines motivate it to move upwards, along them, taking in the decorative background for the first time. From Marie’s eyes, the upwards tilt of their glance pushes our eye towards her hair and her hat; the downwards pointing of her hat’s feathers gestures it down to her pearls and her decolletage; It takes in her bodice, then follows her arms to the plucked cabbage rose; the rose’s stem points to her dress’s skirt so it goes there; her dress’ skirt points towards the planted and upkept bush of cabbage roses; from there, due the bush’s left-and-upwards momentum it travels to the flourishing, sculpted tree; it moves from the tree’s trunk to its foliage. The colours of these symbols of wealth, add to their connotations of decadence as well: the gold of Betty’s ringlets and the rouge of her makeup, the deep emerald of her dress, manchon and hat, and the conch shell pink of the mural and the ivory and rose of its details; the creams of Marie’s turban and its feathers, the silver of her hair and the alabaster and rouge of her makeup, the pressed violet of her dress and the ivory of its lace and ribbons, the chartreuse and blush of the cabbage rose bush and the hazelnut and peacock green of the tree. The striking complementary contrast between the cool greens of Betty’s sumptuous garments and the warm pinks of her ornate space communicates drama, and the powerful contrast between the lightness of the hues of Marie’s extravagant appearance and the intensity of the colours of her cultivated surrounding communicates dynamism, both of which, contribute to the ‘rich’ qualities of the portraits. Portrait of Betty Jane Kimbark (Kim Ondaatje at age of 10) was done in Kerr’s established style, a mixture of Impressionism and Neoclassicism, and Marie Antoinette with a Rose was completed in Vigée’s iconic style, Neoclassicism incorporated into Rococo. Impressionism renders subjects in relation to movement and dynamism, while Neoclassicism aims to capture subjects’ austerely, to grasp their quiddity; the two movements conflict in their aspirations and techniques, but Kerr blends them by applying Impressionist techniques in a way which succeeds in the aspirations of Neoclassicism. Kerr ‘builds’ her painting out of ‘broken’ lines of mixed and unmixed colour placed mostly beside and occasionally on top (as in Betty’s hair, the buttons on her dress, the lights of her hat and the floral wall art) of each other. These lines naturally form both organic (ex. the curls of her hair, the lace of her collar, the feather in her hat, the flowers and leaves behind her) and geometric (her hat, her dress’ buttons, her dress and its texture, the painted ribbon of lace behind her) shapes. The accumulation of these shapes creates Betty and the background: the shapes fuse together, and from a distance, the wholeness and stability of the real Betty and what she is standing in front of, are presented. More than developing a portrait that is representational, Kerr’s capturing of her subject material is symmetrical, harmonious, naturalistic and self-effacing. Rococo’s ambition is to depict subjects through a lens which emphasizes or adds to their theatricality (their drama, excess, fantasy), while as considered, Neoclassicism intends to render subjects according to principles of aesthetics and realism; Vigée evokes Rococo by capturing through Neoclassicism’s aesthetic and realist principles, theatrical subject matter. Vigée’s portrait is essentially, a photograph: she paints Marie Antoinette holding a cabbage rose in a garden of Versailles as it is occurring in front of her. Marie Antoinette – looking like the embodiment of the Rococo essence and displaying its characteristics of ornamentation, curvedness and softness – and the garden – a recurring setting in Rococo art and comprising of waving lines and billowiness – are inherently Rococo. Vigée translates her ‘Rococo’ in real life, subject matter into a work of Neoclassicism. Balance, order, reason, restraint and clarity – the fundamentals of the Neoclassical approach to art – are not just evident in, but govern, the artist’s portrait. Upon first glance there is a stasis and a oneness to Kerr’s Portrait of Betty Jane Kimbark (Kim Ondaatje at age of 10) and Vigée’s Marie Antoinette with a Rose: the girl and the young woman are carefully posed and placed into their settings – beautiful models, in beautiful costumes, in beautiful locations. On the surface, all of the visual cues work to reinforce a set of themes – beauty, status and wealth; the sumptuous palettes of the works bleed these themes, and as the eye digests the scenes, these themes are consistently in play. Someone with a background in art history might have the idea that Kerr’s and Vigée’s works signify stasis and oneness challenged for them, once they perceive the heterogeneity of the art movements that are found within them, the push-and-pull between Impressionism and Neoclassicism in Kerr’s case, and between Neoclassicism and Rococo in Vigée’s. Upon a closer inspection, the ugliness of the first portrait – Betty Jane Kimbark’s hollow eyes and lifeless body – and the masculinity of the second portrait – Marie Antoinette’s protective stare and capable stance – complicate the ‘simple’ signification that the paintings appear to have. Whether the references for Betty’s or Marie’s looking at the observer are known, that there is a boldness and a determination in their doing so, that confronting the observer to put forth a point (like Betty) or upholding dominance in the interaction with the observer as a form of power (like Marie) are in the portraits, deepens everything that the portraits represent by multiple levels. Betty, with her mechanical posture, looks like a mannequin, while Marie, standing powerful amidst nature’s bounty, looks like a king; their posed-ness and their placed-ness contain significations against the rules and pressures placed on them, and the expectations and misperceptions of them. Portrait of Betty Jane Kimbark (Kim Ondaatje at age of 10) by Estelle Muriel Kerr and Marie Antoinette with a Rose by Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun are not beautiful paintings of beautiful rich girls: they are works of empowerment, protesting the accepted and perpetuated mistreatment and abuse of young women, made in incompatible time periods and in disparate locations.
Bibliography:
Atanassova, Katerina. “Laura Muntz: A Woman Artist Navigating the Art Scene at the Turn of the Century.” National Gallery of Canada, National Gallery of Canada, 8 Mar. 2021, www.gallery.ca/magazine/your-collection/laura-muntz-a-woman-artist-navigating-the-art-scene-at-the-turn-of-the. Accessed 4 Apr. 2022.
Butlin, Susan. The Practice of Her Profession: Florence Carlyle, Canadian Painter in the Age of Impressionism. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009.
Herrera, Rebecca. “1783 – Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Marie Antoinette with a Rose.” Fashion History Timeline, FIT, 9 Aug. 2019, fashionhistory.fitnyc.edu/1783-vigee-le-brun-antoinette/. Accessed 5 Apr. 2022.
“Hyacinthe Rigaud: 1659-1743.” Chateau de Versailles, Chateau de Versailles, en.chateauversailles.fr/discover/history/great-characters/hyacinthe-rigaud. Accessed 4 Apr. 2022.
“Kerr, Estelle Muriel.” Canadian Women Artists History Initiative, Canadian Women Artists History Initiative, 12 Aug. 2013, cwahi.concordia.ca/sources/artists/displayArtist.php?ID_artist=28. Accessed 30 Mar. 2022.
“Marie-Antoinette, reine de France (1755-1793).” Chateau de Versailles, Chateau de Versailles, collections.chateauversailles.fr/#92a381bf-ea4b-4ba2-af13-6c2b805fce6f. Accessed 30 Mar. 2022.
Smith, Roberta. “She Painted Marie Antoinette (and Escaped the Guillotine).” The New York Times, 11 Feb. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/arts/design/review-vigee-le-brun-metropolitan-museum.html. Accessed 4 Apr. 2022.
Tostevin, Lola. Who Is Kim Ondaatje?: The Inventive Life of a Canadian Artist. Inanna Publications, 2022.
“Versailles After the French Revolution.” Chateau de Versailles, Chateau de Versailles, en.chateauversailles.fr/discover/history/key-dates/versailles-after-french-revolution. Accessed 30 Mar. 2022.
Wall text for Portrait of Betty Jane Kimbark (Kim Ondaatje at age of 10), by Estelle Muriel Kerr. Kim Ondaatje: The House on Piccadilly Street, 24 July 2021-27 Mar. 2022, Art Gallery of Toronto, Toronto.
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