Paul Smith, Impressionism and the Impressionists

Feminist Interpretations of Impressionism

Feminist art history combines a good deal of what is best about social and psychoanalytical art history (see below), although at times it tends to impose a rigid kind of re-description on artist's intentions and paintings at the expense of historical accuracy. Impression, Sunrise is not the most obvious candidate for this kind of interpretation, as feminist histories of impressionism have concentrated on how beliefs about gender (and psychoanalytical factors) might have affected what and how men and women painted. For example, it empahsises how the subjects painted by 4 men and women were different because the social spaces available to them were different, and on how men and women viewed one another differently.

However, looking at a number of paintings, it is obvious that beliefs about gender affected the range of subjects that the men and women impressionists could paint easily. The men were free to go more or less anywhere (including the café and the brothel) without breaking taboo, and the paintings of Degas, Renoir and other male impressionists show the wide variety of places they entered and used for motifs (or "subjects").

Berthe Morisot, On the Balcony (1871-1872)

Mary Cassatt, Self-portrait)(c.1878)

 On the other hand, beliefs about "respectable" behaviour for women greatly restricted the movements of the middle-class women impressionists. The paintings of Morisot and Cassat show, for example, that they were largely confined to the domestic environment. Impressionist paintings also show the attitudes which men often took towards each other and, more crucially, towards women. Working on developments in psychoanalysis, many feminist writers argue that the majority of works by the male impressionists contain or represent an active, male way of looking which also involved a relationship of power over the passive, female recipient of that gaze. In contrast, many paintings by the women impressionists exhibit a more complex set of attitudes about looking and being looked at. Sometimes they conform to stereotype and show women as "natural" objects of male attention, but others break the rules and show how women experience looking and being looked at in ways that men do not -- except very occasionally.