The meaning of a painted portrait and even its subject may be far more complex than expected, Tamar Garb reveals in this book. She charts for the first time the history of French female portraiture from its heyday in the early nineteenth century to its demise in the early twentieth century, showing how these paintings illuminate evolving social attitudes and aesthetic concerns in France over the course of the century.

The author builds the discussion around six canonic works by Ingres, Manet, Cassatt, Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse, beginning with Ingres’s idealized portrait of Mme de Sennones and ending with Matisse’s elegiac last portrait of his wife. The chapters offer meditations on these individual paintings, each of which dramatises in its own way the historical place of portraiture and the modern construction of the feminine. During the hundred years that separate these works, the female portrait went from being the ideal genre for the expression of painting’s capacity to describe and embellish “nature,” to the prime locus of its refusal to do so. Picasso’s Cubism, and specifically Ma Jolie, provides the fulcrum of this shift.

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Author

PublisherYale University Press

Print publication date September 2007 (out of print)

Print ISBN 9780300111187

EISBN 9780300269178

Illustrations 231

Print Status out of print

Publisher (out of print)

WorldCat

Google Books

Base text size -

Chapter images ()