Esther Pressoir, The Unknown “Cool Girl” Painter.

Painting has always been given a limelight. From the nature of art to compassion, paintings have a depth that allows them to talk with their admirers.

Famous painters like Leonardo da Vinci, Mozart, and Van Gogh speak through their paintings and art. However, does the world know these artists and paintings for their talent or is it because they were just men?

Similar to these painters, Esther Pressoir was also a painter, but have we heard about her? Do we know about her paintings?

Credits: Artherstory

Esther Pressoir can be titled as the woman who restructured the concept of the modern woman, mainly through her paintings titled, “Sally”. It was Sally, who can be seen perched on the arm of a wood-framed chair, resting her weight on her bent knees with a burning cigarette in one hand and a single beaded bracelet in the other.

Who was Esther Pessoir?

Born to a family of French Canadian immigrants, Pressoir always found her passion in the arts from an early age. Securing herself a scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design, she graduated from the department of painting and drawing in 1923.  

Given her talent in painting, she had a very successful career as a painter, printmaker, and ceramicist. Even her spot drawings were featured in The New Yorker magazine.

Mainly known as the “Modern Women’s Painter”, Pressoir provided her artistic platform for the female whom she painted or used as a muse for the paintings.  One such companion or muse was Sally.

The encounter between Pressoir and Sally is not very well documented, but it is sure that they met on the  Pressoir bicycle expedition upon a dare (so cool) that took almost seven months across Europe to prove she could do it. She embraced this journey from Italy with 30 pounds of art supplies and cigarettes, which created her Scanlan notes.

It was these very Scanlan notes that would later create her as the painter of modern women, who symbolizes independence, bravery, and trailblazing.

Pressoir and Her Paintings

It is to be noted that she was mainly influenced by the style of Expressionism, thus carrying a variety of diversity in the works she created. She created nudes of herself, models, and lovers.

Her notes also read a painting of a black dancer from Harlem, Florita.

Credits: Rhodes Island School of Design

Pressoir’s notes contained a dozen “pictures of Florita”, which stayed with her [Pessoir] itself as there were little to known artists who would create paintings with black subjects.

Pressoir envisioned an economic language and filtered the characters that would define her work for decades to come.  Pressoir and her paintings in a way paved the feminine nuances through dressing, appearance, and mainly through rejecting and reframing the corset through the drawings she did as potential spot drawings for The New Yorker magazine.

Pressoir’s smoking was also a contribution to the making of “modern women”. The 1020s advertisement considered smoking to be chic and classy.

In one way or another, Pressoir spoke for herself and for others. Either through painting that involved Black subjects as focus, or riding a bicycle all around Europe, Scanlan notes, reforming the concept of corsets, she compelled herself to be a modern women’s painter.

She was a woman of ambition who flaunted her sensual, self-assured and self-made artist who still influences the artistic world.