Gardens and Gender in French Impressionism: Morisot and Caillebotte

Introduction: Gardens as Theme and Vehicle in French Impressionism

The French Impressionists rendered modern bourgeois life, often by focusing on gardens and leisure activities. Both Berthe Morisot and Gustave Caillebotte use garden scenery as a background for conveying themes related to modern life in France in the late nineteenth century. Morisot's The Basket Chair (1885) depicts a mother and her young child in a private, fenced-off garden. Caillebotte's The Orange Trees (1878) conveys a scene in a public park, most likely in Paris. The Impressionist gardens are at once a vehicle and the central subject matter.

As vehicle, the gardens allow the painters to explore new artistic techniques: the means by which to render light; the use of a delicate and nuanced palette; and the clever use of brushstrokes that make the distance at which the viewer studies the painting more significant than it had been in earlier traditions. As subject matter, the gardens serve symbolic as well as literal functions in both paintings. Central to both Morisot's and Caillebotte's renditions of gardens are their depictions of gender relations at the end of the nineteenth century in France. Gendered worlds are depicted as distinct and separate, yet possibly egalitarian. Even though the two artists accomplish their thematic and formal goals differently, both Morisot and Caillebotte use gardens to represent the social, political, and economic realities of late nineteenth-century Europe.