Marie Bracquemond

In 1894 the critic Gustave Geffroy named the three great women of Impressionism: Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, and Marie Bracquemond. Two of those names are famous now. The third had, by then, already put down her brushes for good, and much of the reason lived in her own house.

Marie had trained young, exhibited at the Salon, and married Félix Bracquemond, a celebrated printmaker, in 1869. She moved toward the bright outdoor colour of the Impressionists and showed with them in the 1880s, painting sunlit gardens and terraces at their home in Sèvres, just outside Paris. Her husband, who preferred darker, more traditional work, grew resentful of her direction. By their son's later account he belittled her ambition, kept her canvases from visitors, and offered little of the encouragement a fellow artist might expect.

Worn down, she stopped painting seriously in 1890 and lived another 26 years in near silence as an artist. Most of the pictures that survive come from that one bright decade in the garden at Sèvres.