Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Painting and the Novel in France and Britain, 1800–1860 by Alexandra K. Wettlaufer (review)

Alexandra Wettlaufer’s book explores the figure of the female artist in France and Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century, juxtaposing the careers of actual women with representations of female artists in portraiture and the novel. This task requires an awareness of the different working conditions of artists on both sides of the Channel, and also a sensitivity to the varied inflections of artistic representation in different cultural milieux and artistic genres. To her credit, the author mainly keeps this vast, complex territory well under control. In her Introduction, exceedingly well grounded in previous scholarship, she describes how female artists and writers contended with two distinct issues: firstly the patriarchy of the artistic profession, and secondly the masculinist discourse of Romanticism—so anxious about the male artist’s survival that it ruthlessly quelled any notion of female creativity. Against these obstacles, Wettlaufer tells a largely positive story of the struggle by women artists to forge a creative identity in the public sphere. Their achievements, she argues, are not least down to their collective endeavors in affirming a sisterhood of artists. Moreover, she suggests, through the realism and pragmatism with which they approached their task, nineteenth-century women artists provided a compelling counter-model to the self-aggrandizing, dislocated Romantic male artist.

Three thematic sections follow on, each neatly comprising three chapters. Part I examines the artist’s studio (actual and represented) as a charged physical space where women forged their careers and negotiated their entry to the sphere of cultural production. Wettlaufer contrasts an eighteenth-century discourse of exceptionality (foregrounded in Mary Sheriff’s work on Louise Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun) where female artists’ endeavors were constructed in terms of isolation and rivalry, with a collective ideal that emerged in the early nineteenth century where female artists’ groups were formed as alternatives to the homosocial cliques of, for example, Jacques-Louis David or the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. More organized French studio practice is contrasted with the informal support networks of the female art scene in Britain. Also stressed is the sisterhood of the arts themselves—the paragone is here gendered as masculine—where female writers and artists mutually supported one another. With reference to paintings of the studio by artists such as Amélie Cogniet and Mary Ellen Best, Wettlaufer shows how gendered notions of space, objectification and viewing practice were challenged. Two novels are discussed in subsequent chapters. Firstly Marceline Desbordes-Valmore’s studio novel, L’atelier d’un peintre, which questions and subverts many gendered tropes of the artist, is read as a “corrective” to the “misognynistic fantasies” of Balzac. Then Anna Mary Howitt’s utopian vision of female solidarity, Sisters in Art, is analyzed with reference to campaigns in Britain for women’s education and professional rights.

In Part II, “Cosmopolitan Visions,” links between the female artist and the Other are explored. Chapter 4 includes a comparative reading of Germaine de Stael’s Corinne, ou l’Italie and Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale, both novels where hierarchies of cultural difference are mapped onto gender hierarchies. The placing so close together of Stael and Owenson throws up some unexpected complexities—which may be more obvious to this English reviewer than to readers from other shores. Namely, it would have been worth exploring Oswald’s “Scottishness.” As a land-owner of English descent, Oswald represents the colonizer of his native Scotland, a land with an unfettered indigenous culture as compelling as that of Ireland or Italy. Class issues subtend this discussion, and one wants to know more about class in relation to other parts of the book. To what extent did the “sisterhood” of artists enable women of all backgrounds, not just those from artistic or privileged milieux, to participate in the sphere of cultural production? “Cosmopolitan Visions” is...