Keywords

women artists, artistic self-fashioning, literary representation

Abstract

Alexandra K. Wettlaufer’s ambitious study of real and fictitious woman painters in early nineteenth-century France and Britain explores the subject of female artistic self-fashioning at a critical historical juncture. Characterizing this as an auspicious time for the development of the woman artist, the author seeks to examine how historical figures and fictional characters both marked as well as facilitated this process. The stated rationale for the use of a comparative approach is that it enables the author “to highlight the dialogic context in which these novels and paintings were produced and consumed, and to map out aesthetic and political intersections in women’s history in the arts that are too often elided by the disciplinary boundaries of study” (5). The construction of a cogent account of myriad artists and writers, paintings and novels, and their various and shifting contexts (national, historical, and otherwise) requires a keen vision and deft hand, and in her Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman, Wettlaufer provides both. Offering trenchant analyses of women painters and their literary representations, the author convincingly argues for their significance in early nineteenth-century British and French culture.

Original Publication Citation

Review of Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Paintings and the Novel in France and Britain, 1800-1860 by Alexandra K. Wettlaufer (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2011). For Nineteenth-Century French Studies 42.5 (Fall 2014).

Document Type

Other

Publication Date

2014

Publisher

Nineteenth-Century French Studies

Language

English

College

Humanities

Department

Art History

University Standing at Time of Publication

Full Professor

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