Stereotypes
In many cases, they depicted women as either worthy and demure home-makers or as sinful prostitutes and objects of lust.
The domestic interior was frequently used to represent the domain of the respectable, bourgeois type, who quietly devoted herself to her duties as mother and wife. By depicting a woman in the street or in a bar, by contrast, the printmaker emphasised her dubious reputation.
Woman as objet d’art
The writer Camille Mauclair recognised these stereotypes as early as 1899. Every female figure in contemporary art, he wrote, was essentially a decorative objet d’art, in which the woman as an individual remained ‘invisible’ – something we also find in printmaking in this period.
Théophile Alexandre Steinlen, A Woman Passing by (Une femme qui passe), 1897
Ker-Xavier Roussel, Woman Peeling Potatoes (L'éplucheuse), 1893
Edmond Aman-Jean, Beneath the Flowers (Sous les fleurs) from the album Album L'Estampe moderne (Album IX), 1898
Further reading
- Octave Uzanne (ed.), Féminies: huit chapitres inédits dévoués à la femme, à l'amour, à la beauté, Paris 1896
- Richard Thomson, The Troubled Republic. Visual Culture and Social Debate in France, 1889-1900, New Haven 2004
- Sidsel Maria Sondergaard (ed.), Women in Impressionism. From Mythical Feminine to Modern Woman, Milan 2006