Flower Diary

Molly Peacock

Description

Molly Peacock uncovers the history of neglected painter Mary Hiester Reid, a trailblazing artist who refused to choose between marriage and a career. Molly Peacock looks at the balancing act of female creativity and domesticity in the life of Mary Hiester Reid, a painter who produced over three hundred stunning, emotive floral still lifes and landscapes. Born in the U.S. in 1854, trained by libertine Thomas Eakins, Mary trailblazed in a life where she fought for her place as a professional artist without having to live as a tragic heroine. She married George A. Reid, a prominent Canadian painter, and moved with him to Toronto, though she kept a studio in the Catskill Mountains. But it was the Edwardian age, and while their relationship was more equal than most, it was Mary's place to manage the domestic scene. So, how do you find the time to paint when you need to get to the market to buy a chicken for dinner? And how do you manage a marriage when your art student becomes your rival?

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 30 septembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781773058399
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Flower Diary In Which Mary Hiester Reid Paints, Travels, Marries & Opens a Door
Molly Peacock






Contents Praise Dedication Author’s Note Prologue: Open Door Part One: Triangles Chapter One: Painter & Traveler Chapter Two: A Study in Greys Chapter Three: An Inglenook, a Studio Chapter Four: Silhouette Chapter Five: Early Spring Part Two: A Calling, a Romance Chapter Six: Nightfall Chapter Seven: Life Class Part Three: Honeymoon Chapter Eight: Yellow Gloves Chapter Nine: Sister Chapter Ten: Still Life with Daisies Chapter Eleven: Gossip Part Four: Paris Chapter Twelve: City of Flowers Chapter Thirteen: Studio in Paris Chapter Fourteen: Angry Mary Part Five: Onteora & Roses Chapter Fifteen: Roses in a Vase Chapter Sixteen: Chrysanthemums Chapter Seventeen: Three Roses Part Six: Toronto & an Arrangement Chapter Eighteen: Modern Madonna Chapter Nineteen: Portraits Chapter Twenty: Evening Star Chapter Twenty-One: Chrysanthemums: A Japanese Arrangement Part Seven: Spain Chapter Twenty-Two: Castles in Spain Chapter Twenty-Three: Madrid and the Prado Chapter Twenty-Four: A Husband Sketches a Marriage Part Eight: Arts & Crafts Chapter Twenty-Five: Moonrise Chapter Twenty-Six: Portrait of Mrs. Reid Arranging Roses Chapter Twenty-Seven: Mrs. Reid in a Frock, Outdoors Chapter Twenty-Eight: Lunch, Friendship, and Menopause Chapter Twenty-Nine: Two Marys, a Miniature Chapter Thirty: Nasturtiums, a Restoration Part Nine: Wychwood, Portrait of the Artist as a Tree Chapter Thirty-One: Women’s Globe Chapter Thirty-Two: Art Metropole Chapter Thirty-Three: Self-Portrait as a Table and Chair Chapter Thirty-Four: Little Bridge Chapter Thirty-Five: Past and Present Still Life Chapter Thirty-Six: Elm Tree Shadows Postlude Timeline Brief Bibliography Image and Literary Credits Notes Index Acknowledgements About the Author Copyright


Praise
Praise for Molly Peacock
“Ms. Peacock uses rhyme and meter as a way to cut reality into sizeable chunks, the sense of the poem spilling from line to line, breathlessly.”
— New York Times Book Review
“Whatever the subject, rich music follows the tap of Molly Peacock’s baton.”
— Washington Post
Praise for The Paper Garden
“Like flowers built of a millefeuille of paper, Ms. Peacock builds a life out of layers of metaphor.”
— The Economist
“Physically beautiful and emotionally transporting . . . Peacock makes her own mosaic by weaving pieces of her life into Delany’s story, and ties it all together with lovely meditations on art, love, history, and botany. The result is a sumptuous bounty of gorgeous words, striking mosaics, and a spirit of joy—the joy of finding one’s true calling.”
— Chicago Tribune
“Delany’s story abounds with energy as Peacock brings her alive. Like her glorious multilayered collages, Delany is so vivid a character she almost jumps from the page.”
—Andrea Wulf, New York Times Book Review
“Peacock does with words what Delany did with scissors and paper, consummately constructing an indelible portrait of a late-blooming artist, an exalted inquiry into creativity, and a resounding celebration of the ‘power of amazement.’”
— Booklist , starred review
“Affecting and engaging, Peacock’s own candor combines with Delany’s wit and honesty to prove that it is never too late to make a life for oneself and to be sustained by art. VERDICT: This marvelous ‘mosaick’ makes an indelible impression.”
— Library Journal , starred review
“[ The Paper Garden ] is organized by flower—forget-me-not, thistle, poppy, etc., each a metaphor for a different phase in Delany’s life. In this way, the book itself is a complicated, delicate, and beautiful collage.”
— Los Angeles Times
“A winsomely unorthodox ode to Delany that is part biography, part miniature coffee-table book, and part memoir. . . . Peacock skillfully and tangibly evokes Delany’s era. . . . The point Peacock makes most convincingly is that Delany’s rarefied oeuvre, and her late but metaphorically apt ‘blooming,’ was the perfect, logical product of the life that preceded it.”
— Toronto Star


Dedication
For my husband, Michael Groden (1947–2021): In the Attempt Is the Success


Author’s Note
1.
Flower Diary enters an era of individuals with limited and destructive ideas about gender, race, and colonialism. While exploring the fascinating life that Mary Hiester Reid lived within such limitations, I have tried to keep a contemporary lens while also telescoping deep into the norms of her day. I hope these shifts address some of the stunning cultural complexities that arise when delving into examples of historical lives.
2.
I had been warned not to undertake this project. She left no diaries! The letters are skimpy! Was that admonition meant to steer me to a well-documented public figure? Someone, for instance, like Mary’s husband? But how could I heed such a caution when daily I hurried past the place of her first studio in Toronto, and weekly stopped to buy vegetables at the historic market where she, too, must have shopped? Often, I ambled past the building that supplanted her light-filled second studio. As a matter of course, I strolled past a cathedral she had to have promenaded past, if not attended, and a smaller church nearby where she no doubt had shifted her bustle on a wooden pew. I’d shiver up Jarvis Street to go to Allan Gardens to visit, in deep winter, the glass Palm House that had opened in her day for all of Toronto to marvel at. I lived inside her geography, an American with Canadian roots who married and moved to Canada, as she did. I paced her ground.
from “443”
I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl—
Life’s little duties do—precisely—
As the very least
Were infinite—to me—
I put new Blossoms in the Glass—
And throw the old—away—
I push a petal from my Gown
That anchored there—I weigh
The time ’twill be till six o’clock
I have so much to do—
And yet—Existence—some way back—
Stopped—struck—my ticking—through—
We cannot put Ourself away . . .
—Emily Dickinson
from “Poem”
Art “copying from life” and life itself,
life and the memory of it so compressed
they’ve turned into each other. Which is which?
—Elizabeth Bishop


Prologue The Open Door
She left a door ajar, slipping through a threshold into the almost impossible-to-balance world of love and art. Over three hundred paintings and a lifelong commitment to a partner: she’s one of the artists from the past who made it possible to live and love in the present. Often, we who look for models of creativity learn the names of those who banged down doors and wrecked their own and others’ lives. But she, who mined a rich and unconventional interior life while clothed in discreet propriety, turned the handle more quietly. And handle is a word that belongs to this woman who made still lifes like diary pages and landscapes like dream logs. She planned and coped, sized up situations, then seized moments, managing a subtle ménage with her painter husband and their talented student in a stiff society, all the while making five transatlantic journeys and creating some of the most devastatingly expressive works you’ve likely never seen, signing them Mary Hiester Reid.


Part One The Triangles


Chapter One Painter & Traveler

Mary Hiester Reid in her Paris studio at 65 Boulevard Arago, 1888–1889, photograph by George Agnew Reid, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
1.
Alone in the world. Mother? Dead. Father? Dead. Only sister an ocean away and never coming back. When the first notes of a calling burst inside her in 1883, she made a decision about the course of her life that took her far away from the rooms and norms of the time she lived in.
Mary Augusta Catherine Hiester (April 10, 1854–October 4, 1921) leapt into real painting, not just ladies’ watercolors, at twenty-nine, when her dress went nearly from her ears to her ankles and close along her arms to the wrists. The registrar at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts wrote her name in a steady, copperplate hand. 1 Then, in the all-female oil painting class, she watched a naked woman climb on a riser and turn her back. Scrunched behind her canvas, Mary crowded for a view among the other young women at this art school led by the genius and so-called libertine Thomas Eakins. Eakins allowed his female students to learn to paint by looking at bodies like their own. Mary saw the lobes of the woman’s buttocks, the s-curve of her spine, the tilt of her shoulders, the angles of shoulder blades moving under her skin as the model positioned her arms. She stared longer and more intently than she’d ever have a chance to in her own bedroom mirror in the household where she lived with her cousins. Breathing in the heavy oil paint and turpentine perfume of the studio, she began to paint flesh like hers.
But later Mary would rarely paint the human figure. Instead she injected that figure into the flesh of flowers, curves of jars, and spines of trees. She painted blowsy, sensuous, billowing roses trapped at the necks in vases as if they were silk-gowned beauties grabbed by their corsets. Pewter jugs as solid as ironclad wills. Evergreens pointed in fierce declarations. Ea