Practical information
Date and time: Sunday 22 June 2025 at 2 pm.
Duration: 45 minutes + 15 minutes questions.
Language: English.
Costs: Free. Museum admission is € 24.
Location: Auditorium Van Gogh Museum.
Participation: Registration is not required. You can just walk in. Please book your museum admission tickets well in advance.
‘Her thoughts enter my bloodstream’
Paula Modersohn-Becker about the diary of fellow painter Marie Bashkirtseff.
In this lecture, professor Linda Goddard explores the writings of women artists who lived in or travelled to France in the late 19th century, with a focus on Marie Bashkirtseff, Paula Modersohn-Becker, and Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot.
At a time when canonical works of French literature promoted an image of the artist as a heroic male genius, women navigated the constraints and possibilities of their own artistic identities in diaries and letters.
Instead of focusing on the negative portrayals by novelists and caricaturists, who depicted female artists as amateurs or aberrations, this lecture examines how, through their own words, they engaged with the challenges and opportunities of their profession. In forms that were often both creative and strategic, women wrote their own influential script of the artist’s life, which in turn shaped how later generations of women artists defined themselves.
Linda Goddard
Linda Goddard is a specialist in 19th- and 20th-century French art and literature, and artists’ writings. She holds a BA in French and Italian language and literature from the University of Oxford and an MA and PhD from The Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
She recently began a new project on the life writings of women artists, in 19th-century France and beyond.
Linda Goddard is Visiting Fellow in 2025.