Examines the work of four female artists of the nineteenth century: Berthe Morisot, Marie Bracquemond, Eva Gonzales, and Mary Cassatt.

This book examines the encounter between Impressionist painting and Parisian consumer culture. Its analysis of Impressionist paintings depicting women as consumers, producers, or sellers in sites such as the millinery boutique, theater, opera, café-concert and market revises our understanding of the representation of women in Impressionist painting, from women¹s exclusion from modernity to their inclusion in its public spaces, and from the privileging of the male gaze to a plurality of gazes. Ruth E. Iskin demonstrates that Impressionist painting addresses and represents women in active roles, and not only as objects on display, and probes the complex relationship between the Parisienne, French fashion, and national identity. She analyzes Impressionist representations of commodity displays and of signs of consumer culture such as advertising and shop fronts in views of Paris. Incorporating a wide range of nineteenth-century literary and visual sources, Iskin situates Impressionist painting in the culture of consumption and suggests new ways of understanding the art and culture of nineteenth-century Paris. Ruth E. Iskin holds a PhD from UCLA. She has received the Andrew W. Mellon fellowship at the Penn Humanities Forum. Her publications include essays in The Art Bulletin, Discourse, and Nineteenth-Century Contexts. She teaches art history and visual culture at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.

This reference organizes and describes the primary and secondary literature surrounding Mary Stevenson Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Eva Gonzalès, and Marie Bracquemond, four major women Impressionist artists. The Impressionist group included several women artists of considerable ability whose works and lives were largely ignored until the advent of feminist art criticism in the early 1970s. They studied, worked, and exhibited with their male counterparts including Degas, Manet, Monet, and Pissarro. The entries provide extensive coverage of the careers, critical reception, exhibition history, and growing reputations of these four female artists and discuss women Impressionists in general as they shared the challenges of becoming accepted as professional artists in late 19th-century society. Containing nearly 900 citations of manuscripts, books, articles, reproductions, films, exhibitions, and reviews, this unique sourcebook will appeal to both art and women's studies scholars. Each artist receives a biographical sketch, chronology, information about individual and group exhibitions and reviews, and a primary and secondary bibliography, which captures details about the artist's life, career, and relationship with other artists. An art works index and names index complete the volume.

"This book is a comprehensive introduction to the works of four women Impressionists: Berthe Morisot, a key protagonist of the Impressionist movement; Mary Cassatt, who had her own special role to play in the movement and was held in high esteem by fellow painter Edgar Degas; Eva Gonzales, a gifted artist and Edouard Manet's only student; and Marie Bracquemond, who abandoned painting in the interests of marital harmony." "This superbly illustrated book also contains essays by a number of writers, who besides providing a knowledgeable introduction to these four women painters, also succeed in conveying to us the context in which they worked."--BOOK JACKET.

Were late nineteenth-century gender boundaries as restrictive as is generally held? In Redefining Gender in American Impressionist Studio Paintings: Work Place/Domestic Space, Kirstin Ringelberg argues that it is time to bring the current re-evaluation of the notion of separate spheres to these images. Focusing on studio paintings by American artists William Merritt Chase and Mary Fairchild MacMonnies Low, she explores how the home-based painting studio existed outside of entrenched gendered divisions of public and private space and argues that representations of these studios are at odds with standard perceptions of the images, their creators, and the concept of gender in the nineteenth century. Unlike most of their bourgeois contemporaries, Gilded Age artists, whether male or female, often melded the worlds of work and home. Through analysis of both paintings and literature of the time, Ringelberg reveals how art history continues to support a false dichotomy; that, in fact, paintings that show women negotiating a complex combination of professionalism and domesticity are still overlooked in favor of those that emphasize women as decorative objects. Redefining Gender in American Impressionist Studio Paintings challenges the dominant interpretation of American (and European) Impressionism, and considers both men and women artists as active performers of multivalent identities.

Accompanying a major traveling exhibition, this comprehensive volume examines Berthe Morisot’s remarkable body of work, painterly innovations, and leading role within the Impressionist canon. Today Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) is considered a major Impressionist artist, a recent development despite the respect received in her lifetime from peers Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. As the only female member of the Impressionist group at its founding in late 1873, Morisot played a major and multifaceted part in the movement, and her works were prized by pioneering dealers and collectors. Lush illustrations from throughout Morisot’s career depict her daring experimentations and her embrace of modern subjects in the city and at the seaside: fashionable young women, and intimate, domestic interiors. Texts examine her in the context of her contemporaries, the critical reception of her work, the subjects and settings she chose, and the state of Morisot scholarship. Berthe Morisot, Woman Impressionist makes an important contribution to the field, with never-before-published letters, interdisciplinary scholarship, and a specific focus on Morisot’s pioneering developments as a painter first, woman second.