Overview
Born in Étampes, Seine-et-Oise, in 1853, Louise Abbéma was one of the most successful women artists of the Belle Époque. Her motto was “Je veux” (“I want”) and in that spirit she pursued an ambitious professional artistic career. She had an unprecedented 21 solo exhibitions during her lifetime and won acceptance to 46 Salons. She relentlessly promoted her work, participating in more than 260 exhibitions, and was extremely prolific, creating more than 800 paintings, countless drawings, over 100 fan designs, as well as numerous prints and illustrations. In 1912, the critic Guillaume Apollinaire cited her alongside Rosa Bonheur and Berthe Morisot as the three nineteenth-century women artists who significantly influenced modern painting.
Abbéma learned to draw and paint in her early teens while her family was living in Italy. After returning to Paris in 1867, she studied under Louis Dévedeux and Charles Chaplin before joining the studio of Carolus-Duran and Jean-Jacques Henner. She made her Paris Salon debut in 1874 with a portrait of her mother, but it was her full-length portrait of the actress Sarah Bernhardt that would make her reputation two years later. The two women had a lifelong intimate friendship, and Abbéma quickly became the primary portraitist for Bernhardt’s artistic circle as well as her own family’s bourgeois and aristocratic network. While her Salon portraits typically featured fashionable women in traditional feminine dress, her private portraiture practice was more radical, providing rare insight into public self-fashioning and intimate queer life in the Belle Époque.
At the 1877 Salon, Abbéma exhibited Luncheon in the Conservatory, a massive 10 by 6.5 foot canvas that included a self-portrait alongside her parents and friends relaxing in Bernhardt’s greenhouse. Contemporary critics frequently referenced Impressionism in their reviews, dubbing Abbéma the “queen of the Impressionist hive” and repeatedly associating her with the “école de Manet.” When shown in Pau the following year, the painting was acquired by the Musée des Beaux-Arts, making it her first work to enter a public collection. By 1879, the critic Edmond Renoir grouped her with Morisot, Mary Cassatt, and Eva Gonzalès as the female leaders of the modern art movement. Like Cassatt, Abbéma was invited to submit murals to the Woman’s Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and she was awarded the Légion d'honneur in 1906.
Not solely a portraitist or genre painter, Abbéma also embraced landscape painting, frequently depicting the Normandy coast and the countryside surrounding her family’s summer home in Plailly. She was an avid gardener and flower painter, but also aggressively pursued decorative panel commissions and more commercial work. She secured major decorative commissions for the Mairie of the 10th arrondissement, for the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, for Guerlain, for Maison Félix, and for the Bénédictine liqueur company, among many others. She also regularly produced illustrations for journals, particularly L’Art et la mode and La Vie moderne, and for more than a dozen books. Abbéma forged her own path as a pioneer of modern French art, leaving behind a body of work that offers a fascinating window into the Belle Époque and women’s changing roles within it.