Abstract

This book examines the relationship of class, gender and race to visual culture in early nineteenth-century France. Drawing extensively on contemporary sources, the author looks at the work of women artists, women art critics and writers to demonstrate that many of the assumptions about female invisibility and objectification in bourgeois culture and society need serious reconsideration. The first half of the nineteenth century was a complex and contradictory period in the formation and contestation of bourgeois ideologies of 'the feminine'. Women, though at a serious disadvantage, became visible as artists, critics and patrons and were not merely invisible, domesticated or 'constructed' by forces outside their control. Women artists such as Angelique Mongez painted heroic neo-classical nudes, while many named (and anonymous) women wrote art criticism, articulating their views as female spectators. Doy also examines notions of 'appropriate' work for women in relation to landscape, genre, sculpture and the emergence of Realism. Of particular interest is the discussion of the representation of black women during this period, when Fren.