Elizabeth Jane Gardner
Encyclopedia
.jpg)
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
academic and salon painter, who was born in Exeter
Exeter, New Hampshire
Exeter is a town in Rockingham County, New Hampshire, United States. The town's population was 14,306 at the 2010 census. Exeter was the county seat until 1997, when county offices were moved to neighboring Brentwood...
, New Hampshire
New Hampshire
New Hampshire is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. The state was named after the southern English county of Hampshire. It is bordered by Massachusetts to the south, Vermont to the west, Maine and the Atlantic Ocean to the east, and the Canadian...
. She was an American expatriate who died in Paris where she had lived most of her life. She studied in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
under the figurative painter Hugues Merle (1823-1881), the well-known salon painter Jules Joseph Lefebvre
Lefebvre
Lefebvre is a common northern French surname. It is also spelled Lefèvre, LeFebvre, LeFèvre, and is used in the related forms Lefeuvre , Lefébure ....
(1836-1911), and finally under William-Adolphe Bouguereau
William-Adolphe Bouguereau
William-Adolphe Bouguereau was a French academic painter. William Bouguereau was a traditionalist; in his realistic genre paintings he used mythological themes, making modern interpretations of Classical subjects, with an emphasis on the female human body.-Life and career :William-Adolphe...
(1825-1905). After Bouguereau's wife died, Gardner became his paramour and after the death of his mother, who bitterly opposed the union, she married him in 1896. She adopted his subjects, compositions and even his smooth facture, adopted them so successfully that some of her work might be mistaken for his. Gardner's best known work may be The Shepherd David Triumphant (1895), which shows the young shepherd with the lamb he has rescued. Among her other works were "Cinderella," "Cornelia and Her Jewels," "Corinne," "Fortune Teller," "Maud Muller," "Daphne and Chloe," "Ruth and Naomi," "The Farmer's Daughter," "The Breton Wedding," and some portraits.
Relationship with Bouguereau
Elizabeth Gardner's relationship with Bouguereau was a subject of great discussion within the Parisian artistic community. They made no secret of their relationship and once engaged to each other, their engagement was to last seventeen years. Mary French, the wife of the major American sculptor Daniel Chester FrenchDaniel Chester French
Daniel Chester French was an American sculptor. His best-known work is the sculpture of a seated Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.-Life and career:...
later recalled that she had "interesting memories...of Bouguereau's studio, where we used to go often, and where was also Miss Jennie Gardner of Exeter, New Hampshire, whom he either married or didn't marry - I have forgotten the details. There was a certain glamour of that young woman of puritan birth, a contemporary of my puritan aunts, living there in the latin quarter and doing something that all Paris talked about.
In 1866, Gardner was the first American woman to exhibit at the Paris Salon
Paris Salon
The Salon , or rarely Paris Salon , beginning in 1725 was the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France. Between 1748–1890 it was the greatest annual or biannual art event in the Western world...
. Awarded a gold medal at the 1872 Salon, she became the first woman ever to receive such an honor. Elizabeth Gardner Bouguereau was accepted to the Salon more than any other woman painter in history and all but a few of the men.