page_title: Romaine Brooks
section_title: Influences
hierarchical_section_title: Romaine Brooks / Influences
caption_attribution_description: At the Piano
context_page_description: Romaine Brooks, was an American painter who worked mostly in Paris and Capri. She specialized in portraiture and used a subdued tonal palette keyed to the color gray. Brooks ignored contemporary artistic trends such as Cubism and Fauvism, drawing on her own original aesthetic inspired by the works of Charles Conder, Walter Sickert, and James McNeill Whistler. Her subjects ranged from anonymous models to titled aristocrats. She is best known for her images of women in androgynous or masculine dress, including her self-portrait of 1923, which is her most widely reproduced work.
  Brooks had an unhappy childhood after her alcoholic father abandoned the family; her mother was emotionally abusive and her brother mentally ill. By her own account, her childhood cast a shadow over her whole life. She spent several years in Italy and France as a poor art student, then inherited a fortune upon her mother's death in 1902. Wealth gave her the freedom to choose her own subjects. She often painted people close to her, such as the Italian writer and politician Gabriele D'Annunzio, the Russian dancer Ida Rubinstein, and her partner of more than 50 years, the writer Natalie Barney.
context_section_description: Brooks kept aloof from the artistic trends and movements of her time, "act[ing] as if the Fauvists, the Cubists, and the Abstract Expressionists did not exist." However, some critics have mistakenly said Brooks was influenced by Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations, a claim Brooks herself refutes in her 1968 audio interview. The imagery of the 1930s drawings continues Brooks's experiments in the Surreal that she began as a teenager in the late 1880s.  Her use of "premeditated" drawings as a route to the subconscious has been compared to automatic drawings by the Surrealists of the 1920s, but Brooks's work predates Surrealists such as André Masson by decades.  MacAvoy called her the first Surrealist.
  The most widely observed influence on Brooks's painting is that of James McNeill Whistler, whose subdued palette probably inspired her to adopt a monotone color scheme with accents of tinted pigments because through this technique she could suggest a classical restraint and create tensions that were modulated by shape, texture, and variations of shading throughout her canvases.  She may have been introduced to Whistler's work by the art collector Charles Lang Freer, whom she met on Capri around 1899, and who bought one of her early works.  Brooks said she "wondered at the magic subtlety of [Whistler's] tones" but thought his 'symphonies' lacked the corresponding subtlety of expression. One 1920 portrait may take its composition from a painting by Whistler. While the poses are almost identical, Brooks removes the little girl and all the details of Whistler's domestic scene, leaving only Borgatti and her piano—an image of an artist completely focused on her art.
caption: James MacNeill Whistler, At the Piano (1858–1859)
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