Description
Book SynopsisWere 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, painti
Trade Review'Kirstin Ringelberg combines critical theory, artist biography, and close analysis in an intellectually engaging manner to bring an understudied topic to art-historical attention. In this important book, she asks us to rethink the standard view of Gilded Age art and consider that male as well as female professional artists of the period were compelled to navigate slippery gender boundaries in their search for critical and popular esteem.' David Lubin, Wake Forest University, USA
Table of ContentsContents: Introduction: the studio, the domestic interior and the ideology of separate spheres; Working men and leisurely ladies: tropes of gender and the artist's studio in the late 19th century; 'The prince of the atelier': negotiating effeminacy in A Friendly Call by William Merritt Chase; 'The painter will not sink into the mother': Mary Fairchild's nursery/studio; Rendering invisible by display: representations of late 19th-century American women; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index.
