Category: feminine beauty

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Challenge to the ideal of femininity

Canadian painter Prudence Heward was an audacious post-Impressionist, and so much more.
Rollande, 1929, Prudence Heward, courtesy National Gallery of Canada.

When I first saw the painting above, I laughed aloud. I was painting badly, my nose dripping horribly. Young Rollandeperfectly echoed my mood. Kudos to the aficionado who texted it to me.

Rollande’s discontent is epitomized by her pink work apron. It is the initial focus of the painting and must have been loathsome to a girl with ambition. She stands, hands on hips, separated by a fence from the Quebec farm that is her lot in life. Even her posture is confrontational. She may be staring directly at us in the Modernist mode, but hers is no happy face. It’s almost as if we are part of the problem.
Compare her face to Bronzino’s Portrait of a Young Man, c. 1530, and you sense where Prudence Heward is heading. Bronzino’s anonymous poet can stare with unsmiling hauteur and we understand that he is the cock of the walk. But women—especially low-status women—are supposed to be cheerful.
Sisters of Rural Quebec, 1930, Prudence Heward, courtesy Art Gallery of Windsor
Rollande also modelled for Heward’s Sisters of Rural Quebec, 1930. The younger girl is her sister, Pierrette. The composition is a brilliant, complex slash of diagonal and vertical lines. It serves to further isolate the sisters, both from each other and from us. Not only are their faces stark and emotional, but note the sunflower at the bottom left corner. It’s in darkness, a mute testimony to their ‘real’ life on the farm.
Apple Tree (Study for Portrait of Ellen), c. 1935, Prudence Heward, courtesy National Gallery of Canada.
“I think that of all the arts in Canada painting shows more vitality and has a stronger Canadian feeling,” Heward wrote in 1942. At that time, Canadian painting had reached a brilliant maturity, separate from its American and British siblings. It was uniquely reflective of the country, its circumstances, its ethos and its pride.
Anna, c. 1927, Prudence Heward, courtesy National Gallery of Canada. She looks as if she’s fallen in the snow.
Prudence Heward was primarily known as a figure painter, although I’ve included a few of her landscapes as well. She was not limited by traditional QuĂ©bĂ©cois expectations herself. Rather, she was born in Montreal to a large, affluent family who supported her artistic inclinations.
During World War I she served with the Red Cross in England. Returning to Canada, she resumed painting, joining the modernist Beaver Hall Hill Group. Her first exposition was in 1924; her first solo show in 1932.
Farmhouse and Car, c. 1933, Prudence Heward, courtesy National Gallery of Canada.
In 1925, she went to Paris on scholarship, studying at the Académie Colarossi. Her work was profoundly influenced by the monumentality and color sensitivity of Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisseand Henri Rousseau.
In Paris, she met her lifelong friend, Isabel McLaughlin. Together, they returned to Paris in 1929 and took sketching classes at the Scandinavian Academy. Heward traveled with McLaughlin and other artist friends throughout her life. They visited the Heward summer home near Brockville on the Saint Lawrence, northern Ontario, the Laurentians and Bermuda. In 1933, Prudence Heward co-founded the Canadian Group of Painters, the successor group to the Group of Seven. 
The Immigrants, Prudence Heward, 1929, private collection, Toronto
A serious car accident in 1939 was the beginning of the end of her career. She continued to paint until 1945, when her health problems forced her to give up her brush. Primary was her worsening asthma. She was seeking treatment for it in Los Angeles when she died in 1947 at the age of fifty. It was an unfortunate, untimely loss for Canadian painting.
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The perfect body

What is the ideal of beauty in art? That’s a moving target.

Death of Boudicca, by Carol L. Douglas. The sculpted female form is peculiar to our own time in history. Our ancestors would have found it dĂ©classĂ©.
I once had a perfect body, you know. Like most women, I didn’t realize that until I’d lost it to childbearing, cancer and that ultimate indignity, age.
I was reminded of this yesterday when a friend showed me new photos of her daughter, who’s an actress (and a great kid). Her publicity pictures focus on her long, articulated muscles, whippet-thin torso, and delicate fair hair. By contemporary standards, she is physically perfect.
Longing, by Carol L. Douglas
“You have to suffer to be beautiful,” my grandmother told me as she tried to tame my frizzy hair into submission. I must have told my own kids that without thinking, because I’ve heard it from their mouths.
“Perfection is ‘lean’ and ‘taut’ and ‘hard’ — like a boy athlete of twenty, a girl gymnast of twelve. What kind of body is that for a man of fifty or a woman of any age? ‘Perfect’? What’s perfect? A black cat on a white cushion, a white cat on a black one
 A soft brown woman in a flowery dress
 There are a whole lot of ways to be perfect, and not one of them is attained through punishment,” wrote Ursula K. Le Guin in The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination.
Physical ideals change, but they are reflected by artists. That is their only tangible record. Sleeping Venus may have been painted by a woman (Artemisia Gentileschi) but it suggests all the tropes of female beauty of the time. She is soft, languid, deferential. She is young, because youth has always been associated with beauty.
Michelle reading, by Carol L. Douglas
Fashions in beauty were enhanced through whatever panniers, stays or padding were in style at the time. But it wasn’t until the 20th century that women started sculpting our own bodies in earnest. Dieting became a fact of life for most of us. In the 1980s, plastic surgery went mainstream, with women buying dental veneers, breast and buttocks augmentation, nose jobs and eye lifts.
Changes in beauty norms are more pronounced for women, but they’re true for men, too. Historically, the markers of male beauty were money, power and class. These were expressed through clothing, ornamentation, and setting. Sculpted muscles were considered vulgar, reflecting the hard work of the lower classes. The shift to beefcake as beauty corresponds historically with the shift to sculpted bodies in women.
The Laborer Resting, by Carol L. Douglas
As always, our ideals about beauty reflect our longing for something we cannot have. Only the wealthy have the leisure and money to afford personal trainers at expensive gyms, chefs to create careful, well-thought-out diet regimens, plastic surgery or tropical tans. The vast majority of us grab breakfast on the run and head in to work, where we sit all day.
“Beauty always has rules. It’s a game. I resent the beauty game when I see it controlled by people who grab fortunes from it and don’t care who they hurt. I hate it when I see it making people so self-dissatisfied that they starve and deform and poison themselves,” wrote Le Guin.
“There’s the ideal beauty of youth and health, which never really changes, and is always true. There’s the ideal beauty of movie stars and advertising models, the beauty-game ideal, which changes its rules all the time and from place to place, and is never entirely true. And there’s an ideal beauty that is harder to define or understand, because it occurs not just in the body but where the body and the spirit meet and define each other.”