Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1789–1914

Focusing specifically on portraiture as a genre, this volume challenges scholarly assumptions that regard interior spaces as uniquely feminine. Contributors analyze portraits of men in domestic and studio spaces in France during the long nineteenth century; the preponderance of such portraits alone supports the book's premise that the alignment of men with public life is oversimplified and more myth than reality. The volume offers analysis of works by a mix of artists, from familiar names such as David, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Rodin, and Matisse to less well-known image makers including Dominique Doncre, Constance Mayer, Anders Zorn and Lucien-Etienne Melingue. The essays cover a range of media from paintings and prints to photographs and sculpture that allows exploration of the relation between masculinity and interiority across the visual culture of the period. The home and other interior spaces emerge from these studies as rich and complex locations for both masculine self-expression and artistic creativity. Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1789-1914 provides a much-needed rethinking of modern masculinity in this period.

Contents: Introduction, Temma Balducci, Heather Belnap Jensen and Pamela J. Warner; The revolution at home: masculinity, domesticity and political identity in family portraiture, 1789-1795, Amy Freund; Picturing paternity: the artist and father-daughter portraiture in post-Revolutionary France, Heather Belnap Jensen; Public and private identities in Delacroix's Portrait of Charles de Mornay and Anatole Demidoff, Jennifer W. Olmsted; At home with the camera: modeling masculinity in early French photography, Laurie Dahlberg; The artist in his studio: dress, milieu, and masculine identity, Heather McPherson; Cézanne, Manet, and the portraits of Zola, Andre Dombrowski; At home in the studio: two group portraits of artists by Bazille and Renoir, Alison Strauber; In bed with Marat: (un)doing masculinity, James Smalls; The competing dialectics of the cabinet de travail: masculinity at the threshold, Pamela J. Warner; Anders Zorn's etched portraits of American men, or the trouble with French masculinity, S. Hollis Clayson; Auguste Rodin, photography, and the construction of masculinity, Natasha Ruiz-Gómez; Matisse and self, the persistent interior, Temma Balducci; Selected bibliography; Index.

Temma Balducci is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Arkansas State University. She has published on the gaze and spectacle in nineteenth-century French art and on feminist art of the 1970s. Her manuscript in progress, Beyond the Flaneur: Gender, Space and the Gaze in Post-Haussmann Visual Culture, challenges the ubiquity of the Baudelairean flâneur in theorizations of gender and space in early Third Republic Paris. Heather Belnap Jensen is Assistant Professor of Art History at Brigham Young University. Her research and publications examine women's contributions to early nineteenth-century culture. She is currently co-editing a volume on women, bourgeois femininity and public space with Temma Balducci, as well as working on a book manuscript titled Art, Fashion and the Modern Woman in Post-Revolutionary France. Pamela J. Warner is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Rhode Island. Her research focuses on art criticism in France during the nineteenth century, and she has published articles in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Studies in the Decorative Arts and the Cahiers Edmond et Jules de Goncourt. Her book in progress focuses on the critical reception of Realism and its ties to materialist philosophy.