A Talk on Impressionism and Clay
Edmond Lachenal, Vase (detail), 1892. Earthenware with underglaze enamels, 17 x 11 3/8 x 11 1/4 in. (43.18 x 28.893 x 28.575 cm). Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, gift of Jeffrey Ruda and Leonard Whitney for the Centennial of the Legion of Honor, 2025.32.5
Pierre-Auguste Renoir began his career painting porcelain. Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, and Mary Cassatt experimented with clay. Paul Gauguin and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec worked on ceramics under the guidance of celebrated ceramicists Ernest Chaplet and Émile Müller. This talk, led by Brittany Severt, Ann Stone Associate Curator of Decorative Arts at the Baltimore Museum of Art, will explore how ceramics were integral to the formation, experimentation, and realization of the Impressionist movement. This lecture is held to complement the Manet & Morisot exhibition at the Legion of Honor.
About the speaker
Brittany Severt is the Anne Stone Associate Curator of Decorative Arts at the Baltimore Museum of Art. An expert in 18th- and 19th-century ceramics and silver, she previously served as a research assistant in decorative arts and design at the Saint Louis Art Museum and attended the Attingham Summer School and the Program in New England Studies. Her publications on decorative arts, curation, global trade, and colonialism can be found in Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400–1800 (2023), Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (2023), and Faenza (2022).
This event is hosted by the San Francisco Ceramic Circle.
