Claude, or Claudine? The subversive feminist art of Claude Hirst

A 19th-century still life painting recently added to the SLAM collection might appear simple, but there’s much more to the work than meets the eye. Paul and Virginia by Claude Hirst, now on view in Charles Oscar Nelson and Anne Nelson Gallery 329, depicts a tattered book, a pipe, and a tobacco pouch. Historically, paintings like Hirst’s were created by male artists and displayed in men’s clubs and saloons. Known as bachelor still lifes, these popular works portrayed objects associated with the lives of men.

However, Hirst was not a man painting for a male audience; she was a woman painting in a male-dominated field. Born Claudine, not Claude, Hirst exhibited her still life paintings using a masculine version of her name, most likely to conceal her identity and be taken seriously as an artist among male contemporaries. She displayed and sold her work in New York alongside compositions by male artists such as John F. Peto and William Michael Harnett; the latter introduced the bachelor still life genre in the US. One of Harnett’s bachelor still lifes, With the “Staats Zeitung,” is also on display at SLAM in Nelson Gallery 329.

Hirst joined a predominantly male field with her hyperrealistic paintings, which tricked the viewer into thinking the objects pictured were real. This illusionistic technique is called trompe-l’oeil, French for “deceives the eye.”

Based on Paul and Virginia, it may seem like Hirst joined her contemporaries’ celebration of traditional male activities. However, a closer look at her work reveals her subtle critique of masculinist culture. One of Hirst’s subversive strategies was including books with legible titles touting feminist writings in her still life paintings. She knew most of her audience—i.e., men—wouldn’t recognize this information, as they simply viewed the items pictured as masculine accessories.

In Paul and Virginia, Hirst depicts one of her favorite feminist texts: Helen Maria Williams’s English translation of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s popular French novel, Paul et Virginie. The novel tells the story of two mothers driven by society to live on a remote island. The women form a sisterly alliance to raise their two children, Paul and Virginie, without any father figures. Their children grow up to fall in love, but end up dying after reentering society, with its restrictive class and gender expectations.

Viewers can see the title of Paul et Virginie on the book pictured in Hirst’s painting, slightly overlapped by the stem of the pipe. The left edge of the novel’s frontispiece, or illustration facing the title page, appears beneath the opened pages of the book, showing an engraving depicting two mothers who embrace while looking down at their babies lying on a small bed.

Hirst added another layer of critique by making translator Helen Maria Williams’s name legible at the bottom of the opened page of the book in the painting. Williams, a renegade English novelist and poet, openly denounced the patriarchy and was a member of the progressive circle around novelist Mary Wollstonecraft. Notably, Wollstonecraft authored A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, one of the earliest and most-important treatises in Europe advocating for the equality of women.

Long before Hirst created her subversive paintings, she was forging an unusual path as a woman artist in the Midwest. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, as the oldest of two daughters, Hirst started painting lessons at the age of 10. She later studied at the McMicken School of Drawing and Design, an unconventional decision at a time when women were discouraged from pursuing a career in art. Hirst could attend McMicken because its founding gift required that all classes offered were open to women, making it one of the most progressive art schools at the time.

After moving to New York City on her own in 1879, Hirst studied privately, excelling in the field of watercolor. She built her reputation as a skillful painter of fruit and floral still lifes before abruptly transitioning to painting bachelor still lifes in 1890, joining the field as one of its only women painters. Notably, this milestone in her career came amid the struggle for women’s equal rights in the United States.

Hirst continued to feature feminist writings in her compositions, achieving notoriety for her hyperrealistic paintings later in life. In her 60s, Hirst’s exhibited works gained widespread acknowledgment through jury prizes and critical acclaim. However, during this same period, she chose to lighten her palette and reject masculine objects included in earlier works.

Hirst continued to paint into her 80s, leaving a legacy of more than one hundred still life paintings. Among her many works, Hirst’s bachelor still lifes, with their critiques of masculinist culture, perhaps offer the most opportunity for dialogue. At SLAM, Paul and Virginia is displayed near Harnett’s still life in Nelson Gallery 329, as previously mentioned, but it also joins Hannah Brown Skeele’s Still Life with Strawberries.

Like Hirst, Skeele was a 19th-century woman painter. However, unlike Hirst, she displayed her works using her real name and focused on subjects deemed more appropriate for female artists. For example, Still Life with Strawberries depicts a serving dish and pitcher, both traditional symbols of domesticity at the time.