Artists Affiliated with Giverny

Frederick MacMonnies

Date: 1896

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Object number: 1992.46

Text Entries: Here the sculptor-turned-painter wears a pink tie and stands before his favorite tapestry from his extensive collection, probably the Enlevement d'Iphengene, which hung in his Giverny studio. MacMonnies' brush proudly gestures to himself as does Velásquez's in Las Meninas. In both this self portrait and The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Self Portrait, MacMonnies holds his brush in his left hand. Frederick MacMonnies in His Studio by Ellen Emment Rand depicts him painting with his right hand, which is the actual case.

Frederick MacMonnies

Date: 1904

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Object number: 1999.88

Text Entries: Regally arrayed in white lace with a feathered chapeau, Mabel Conkling (1871-1966) stands in front of the extraordinary blue-green tapestries found in MacMonnies' Giverny studio. Conkling and her husband David Paul Conkling (1871-1926) were students of the sculptor-turned-artist and were frequent guests at Le Moutier. Presumably commissioned by the couple, since it remained in the Conkling family, the painting required fourteen sittings for completion-an implication of MacMonnies' desire for perfection in his art. Despite family legend that the portrait was painted in MacMonnies' New York studio in Macdougal Alley, Greenwich Village, records show that the portrait was painted in July and August of 1904 in Giverny.

Frederick MacMonnies

Date: c. 1896–1897

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Object number: 1999.90

Text Entries: In 1885 former public school teacher Mary Fairchild left St. Louis, were she and her fellow female art students had successfully campaigned for access to the nude model, to study art in Paris on a scholarship; she would remain there for twenty-five years. She launched a highly successful career as a painter, participating in Salon exhibitions and producing both monumental public works (such as a mural for the Women's Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition) and intimate glimpses of her unconventional domestic life, such as these two paintings of her daughter Bertha. The converted monastery that MacMonnies shared as a home and studio with her husband, the sculptor and painter Frederick MacMonnies, became a social center for American artists and students in Giverny.

Frederick MacMonnies

Date: c. 1896–1897

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Object number: 1999.91

Text Entries: In 1885 former public school teacher Mary Fairchild left St. Louis, where she and her fellow female art students had successfully campaigned for access to the nude model, to study art in Paris on a scholarship; she would remain there for twenty-five years. She launched a highly successful career as a painter, participating in Salon exhibitions and producing both monumental public works (such as a mural for the Women's Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition) and intimate glimpses of her unconventional domestic life, such as these two paintings of her daughter Bertha. The converted monastery that MacMonnies shared as a home and studio with her husband, the sculptor and painter Frederick MacMonnies, became a social center for American artists and students in Giverny.