In what was intended as the opening line of a 1951 catalogue essay to an exhibition by the painter Leonor Fini, Jean Cocteau wrote: ‘There is always, at the margin of work by men, that luminous and capricious shadow of work by women.’ Not surprisingly, Fini excised it. In what was intended as the opening
Philippa Stockley on the new book by Ruth Butler Hortense Fiquet, Camille Doncieux, Rose Beuret. Who are they? The wives of Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet and Auguste Rodin.The third is the best known; the others have largely been omitted from history. Demonstrably, in Fiquet’s case. Cézanne’s first biographer, Georges Rivière, was Fiquet’s daughter-in-law’s father. Rivière
The ability to manufacture discontent from whatever materials are to hand is one of the most consistent characteristics of human nature. In Hubbub, pithy historian Emily Cockayne roams the seamy, stinky and squelchy side of English life: ‘The experiences presented here are unashamedly skewed towards the negative . . . . I am deliberately not
‘A ship is sooner rigged by far, than a gentleman made ready,’ scoffed Thomas Tomkis in 1607, about how long men took to dress. But in the 17th century wasting time this way was no male preserve. ‘Women,’ wrote Joseph Swetnam, ‘are the most part of the fore-noone painting themselves and frizzling their haires and