François Bonvin French (1817-1887)

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Image courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

A Seated Woman, Sewing by a Table, 1848 Charcoal on brown paper 40.2 x 28.7 cm Bequeathed by P.M. Turner, 1942 WA 1942.32

Bonvin found art as an escape from the inhospitability of home. A wealthy friend of his mother recognized his potential and sent him to the parish school for a proper education. He left shortly thereafter to continue working to support his family, and then married a laundress at age 20, all the while avidly drawing. Bonvin’s luck ironically changed when he became afflicted with illness which would plague him for life. During his initial convalescence he drew to keep himself occupied. A doctor noticed the refinement of the sheets of paper strewn around his bed and brought them to the attention of Françios Marius Granet, a man with very close ties to the academicians.[ii]

To Bonvin, his drawings were a relentless pursuit to depict simple and modest themes of daily life he witnessed. Granet saw Bonvin’s commitment to daily life as emblematic of the political forecast of the time and a seamless connection to the nascent and growing Realist movement in France.

A Seated Woman, Sewing by a Table of 1848 would have been characteristic of Bonvin’s output in the late 1840’s when a number of other artists began to draw inspiration from the destitution of the working class. The Revolution of 1848 which ushered in Louis Napoleon and France’s Third Republic, solidified Bonvin’s status as a member of the Realist group, along with Gustave Courbet, with whom he exhibited in the 1850-1851 Salon. It was here that he was lauded as an important artist who recorded his own times, in concert with the rise of Realism.[iii]

Bonvin’s themes, for all they were championed by the Realists, were never considered revolutionary. His immediate world was all he cared to venture into. A commitment to the intimacy and humility of the labor of the common person is what is revealed in A Seated Woman, Sewing by a Table. Visiting the Louvre, Bonvin was exposed to genre scenes of the seventeenth century Dutch Masters and Chardin, the eighteenth century artist[iv] who deeply affected him. Bonvin emulated the former, but brought his figures closer to the viewer, giving them a volume and presence like Chardin’s, and illuminated them in light.

With charcoal on brown paper, this woman sewing is as humble as the materials Bonvin uses to draw her. Her robust body is anchored deep into the chair that envelops her, comfortably prohibiting her from leaving her task. Her solitary efforts are concentrated. Her diligence is amplified by her downturned face which she does not lift, though she is being watched. Her hand is buried under the garment on her lap, conflating her body with her earnest labor.  With the pressure of the charcoal, Bonvin renders just the glow of light from a candle which burns from outside the scene. He demarcates the seam that separates wall and ground by simply altering the direction of the line of the charcoal. An economy of line and form evidence Bonvin’s attention to drawing only the bare essentials of the activity, somehow allowing the drawing process to mirror the simplicity of this woman’s life.

The Realism of Bonvin’s scenes document proof of his own time. In retrospect, his works are sometimes read as the forerunner to Impressionsim, as he studied directly from nature by painting modern reality. It is Gabriel Weisberg who said about Françios Bonvin, “He painted what he saw, and he lived what he painted.”[v]