Artists Who Painted Their Wives: Background information when reading Paint Your Wife

Artists Who Painted Their Wives

This article relates to Paint Your Wife

In Paint Your Wife, Alma Martin, though just thirty and physically healthy, was left behind while other fit men went to war. The loss of both his young wife and some of his memory in a train accident had rendered him "a less-than dangerous male. A male without horns." During his rehabilitation, he began to draw. Art became his obsession; his way to recreate what he had lost and help others to see what they had. As a character says of Alma: "My mother has an interesting thesis. She believes Alma decided to build a picture of his late wife from the bits and pieces of the women in the district that caught his eye."

The tragic death of his wife and dissipation of memory justify Alma's admiration of, and frequent references to, the French impressionist artist Pierre Bonnard, who painted almost exclusively from memory. He studied his subject, reconstructing it at leisure. Pierre Bonnard met Maria Boursin, who called herself Marthe de Méligny in 1893, when he was 26 years old. She became his friend, muse, lover and finally his wife in 1925, when he would discover her true age and name and finally introduce her to his family. He sketched and painted numerous works of Marthe, many in the bath, (which has been suggested to have been therapy for her suspected tuberculosis). Despite her advancing age, Bonnard always depicted Marthe with a youthful face.

Another artist who painted his wife was Henri Matisse. He painted Amélie Matisse with intensity in the first 20 or so years of the 20th century. He created a charged atmosphere of tension in an extraordinary effort to express his emotions on canvas. His work shocked contemporaries and often sparked outrage – the flagrant Blue Nude, a provocative, perverse portrait of Amélie reclining in the garden sunlight was misunderstood and received by critics like a physical assault on the senses, language Matisse used himself to explain his almost violent process. He was so passionate and determined to express himself, he would risk ruining a painting rather than accept a surface likeness.

From Paint Your Wife:

Alma Martin once told my mother a story that Matisse had Madame Cézanne in mind when he painted his own wife...and she was beginning to think that if it was good enough for Matisse to strip Madame Cézanne into his wife's painting then maybe, just maybe, she would pose nude for Alma in order to help him flesh out his memory of his lost wife.

Paul Cézanne met Marie-Hortense Fiquet Cézanne in Paris in 1869, and an early portrait from 1872 suggests that she modeled for him beginning when she was twenty-two. Anticipating his father's disapproval, Cézanne kept his relationship and their child a secret for many years. They lived separate lives, prompting speculation they were no longer close when they finally did marry, however she posed for him more than anyone else. Again from Paint Your Wife:

The woman in Cézanne's life was a comely woman with piled brunette hair. She was his constant subject, forty-four portraits in all. That's a lot of staring. That's also a lot of patient sitting. In the portraits, hers is a face worn by silence. She sits as one would sit in the dark. Her face is closed down. She begins to look fed up. She looks like she would rather be out dancing. She looks like the nineteen-year-old she was when she and Cézanne first met, someone who knows it is time for something else but who is unable to rise from the chair.

In the Bathroom by Pierre Bonnard, courtesy of www.offtheeasel.com
Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra) by Henri Matisse
Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress by Paul Cezanne

Filed under Music and the Arts

This article relates to Paint Your Wife. It first ran in the April 20, 2016 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.