Fashion and the Painting of Parisian Modernity: New academic and curatorial perspectives

By Sinéad Furlong-Clancy

Fig. 1. Édouard Manet, Le Chemin de fer (The Railway), 1873, oil on canvas, 93.3 x 111.5 cm, The National Gallery of Art, Washington D. C. Gift of Horace Havemeyer in memory of his mother, Louisine W. Havemeyer. Courtesy The National Gallery of Art, Washington D. C.

Introduction

If we take as a starting point Édouard Manet’s Le Chemin de fer (The Railway, 1873), with its two anonymous, fashionably dressed girls the focus of our close-up attention, it would seem clear that fashion plays a key role in the iconic paintings of modernity. The Railway – the nominal subject of Manet’s painting – is located behind the tall railings in the background, and is mostly obscured by the girls in the compressed foreground pictorial plane. As viewers we are there with them, waiting it would seem, for someone to arrive, or for something to happen. The clouds of steam in the background indicate that a train has just passed or is on its way, but before we can think of the train, we are faced with the proposition of these two young female bodies, dressed in the latest fashions, one a young girl, the other a young woman, positioned carefully by Manet to attract our curiosity and hold our attention. Curiously, we are also engaged in multiple visual perspectives and propositions: we look at the older of the two as she sizes us up (we appear to have interrupted her reading); we look at the young girl but are also positioned as the young girl, looking beyond the bars into the exciting world of the steam railway, of the trains which connected city and countryside, their engines the machinery of technological advancement and industrial production, of excitement and danger, noise and sensation, as Émile Zola’s sensationalist train-drama novel, La Bête humaine (1890) set in and around the Gare Saint-Lazare, the setting for Manet’s painting, makes clear.^[1]

In 1872, after a visit to Manet’s studio, the art critic Philippe Burty wrote:

The swallows are gone. The artists return… [Manet] has in his studio, not quite finished, a double portrait, sketched outdoors in the sun. A young woman, wearing the blue twill that was in fashion until the autumn (…).^[2]

As the catalogue to the 1983 Manet retrospective suggests, this note on fashion – together with the bunch of grapes, and the little girl’s bare arms – suggests a warm September day.^[3] As nineteenth-century art commentators noted Manet’s attention to detail when it came to contemporary fashion, it might seem curious that until 2012/2013, fashion had been only an ancillary point of linkage within the curatorial practice of the paintings collections of the world’s largest art museums; institutions which influence global trends in curatorial and academic practice. While the question ‘Is Fashion Art?’ had been frequently debated, in prominent fora, for example by fashion journalist Suzy Menkes in the New York Times (2011) and fashion historian Valerie Steele in a keynote lecture at Mumok, the Museum of Modern Art, Vienna (2012), the central relevance of fashion history to art history, up until this point, had tended to be neglected.^[4]

This paper examines two major 2012/13 exhibitions, academic approaches to and constructions of nineteenth-century French art history – the painting of modernity – and the context of fashion history as an academic discipline, starting with the career of (and initial resistance encountered by) Steele, now Director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York. The two exhibitions discussed are ‘Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity’ (‘L’Impressionnisme et La Mode’), which exhibited paintings alongside garments and accessories with equal emphasis on both art and fashion (Musée d’Orsay, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, 25 September 2012-22 September 2013), and the 2012 exhibition ‘Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting’ at the Frick Collection, New York (7 February-13 May 2012). ^[5] In the latter, the central role of fashion in a new art-historical understanding emerged from extensive research into and the conservation (technical examination through infrared reflectography) of an iconic painting belonging to the Frick. The exhibition employed detailed fashion analysis to challenge the accepted title of a painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, La Promenade, Mother and Children (1875-1876, fig. 6), now known as La Promenade, a title which I had highlighted as problematic (for the same reasons, relating to fashion, or more specifically, hairstyle) in my doctoral thesis supervised by David Scott (‘Women in the Parks of Paris: Painting and Writing the Female Body, 1848-1900’ (TCD, 2001), recently extended and published as a book (2014)), and in a special-edition essay published in 2003, discussed below.

In the present paper, I discuss my primary research of nineteenth-century Parisian fashion journals and my art-historical practice in the context of this noticeable shift in curatorial and academic perspectives, as the increase in panels at conferences focusing on fashion, or fashion within the context of art history suggests: the fashion interdisciplinary network conference where I presented a version of this paper (Oxford, 2013)^[6] having given a first version in the Trinity College French Research Seminar earlier that year; the 2014 College Art Association conference, where two panels explored the inter-relation of fashion and art, and the 2014 Association of Art Historians conference, with the panel ‘Fashionability: Fashion, Art, Culture.’ The 2015 84th Anglo-American Conference of Historians takes Fashion as its theme, and the 2016 Association of Art Historians conference will also feature a panel on fashion: ‘The Place of Fashion Studies in Academia.’ This is a promising turn of events for art and fashion history, and locates fashion within a more prominent academic and curatorial paradigm, which both enriches and makes more precise our understanding of the painting of Parisian modernity.

Fashion History and Art History

Steele, now Director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, recounts her ‘light-bulb’ moment as a doctoral candidate in European cultural and intellectual history at Yale in the late 1970s/early 1980s: realising that fashion (specifically the debates over the pro-/anti-feminist significance of Victorian corsets) could count as intellectual history; but also revealed to Menkes in her 2012 New York Times profile of Steele, ‘The Freud of Fashion,’ that fashion was then ‘the F word’ within academia.^[7] In another 2012 interview, Steele notes that there are still not that many departments which will support doctorates in fashion.^[8] Steele’s books were fundamental for me in my first year of doctoral studies, enabling my own light-bulb moment (that I could write seriously about fashion within an art-historical approach) and validating my interest in researching nineteenth-century Parisian fashion in conjunction with the art of Manet and the Impressionists.^[9] Examining the wealth of primary source material presented in Steele’s Paris Fashion: A Cultural History (Oxford University Press, 1988) together with that of art historian Robert L. Herbert’s landmark Impressionism: Art, Leisure and Parisian Society (Yale University Press, 1988) and French literature specialist and cultural historian Christopher Prendergast’s Paris and the Nineteenth Century (Blackwell, 1992), I found my focus: writing on the female body and park space in nineteenth-century Paris. More than an aesthetic framing device, the park became the site for my engagement with art and fashion ‒ and cultural, social, urban, literary ‒ history. David Scott’s excellent supervision and intellectual open-mindedness as regards both visual and textual studies and my particular focus on the female body, public space, and nineteenth-century French painting, spurred me on in my research of fashion history within the traditional academic framework of Trinity College Dublin’s doctoral programme, in spite of the fact that fashion studies were not represented in any area of the campus.

Fig. 2. Claude Monet, The Parc Monceau, 1878, oil on canvas, 72.7 x 54.3 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ittleson Jr. Purchase Fund, 1959. Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access Scholarly Content, www.metmuseum.org.

Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity

As the chief curator of ‘Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity,’ Gloria Groom (nineteenth-century paintings specialist at the Art Institute of Chicago) discovered in her initial research testing the idea ‒ during which she sought the advice of historians from different disciplines: fashion, photography, and so on ‒ the undertaking was indeed a departure from existing practice: the first major exhibition to examine fashion, accessories and the ‘stuff’ of modern life (fashion journals, cartes de visite, photographs, department-store catalogues) alongside paintings by not only the Impressionists but those in their circle: Manet, James Tissot, Alfred Stevens.^[10] The exhibition captured the modernity of Paris in a wholly interdisciplinary way, and was both affecting and exhilarating. A particular coup was the Paris and Chicago staging of Edgar Degas’s Chez la modiste (1879/86), which hung opposite a mirror-backed cabinet of hats, so that the viewer felt she was in the milliner’s shop herself; there was a grassy evocation of the parks, gardens and wooded environs of Paris with white cotton muslin dresses slowly rotating in glass cabinets (to which the viewer had 360-degree access); and corsets and undergarments were displayed in close proximity to Manet’s Nana (1877), a courtesan depicted in an elegant state of dishabille, with her gentleman caller looking on.^[11]

Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting

In ‘Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting’ curated by Colin B. Bailey at the Frick Collection in 2012, the central role of fashion in a new understanding of an iconic Renoir painting, La Promenade, previously known as La Promenade, Mother and Children (1875-1876, fig. 6), decisively emerged from the technical examination of that painting by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Charlotte Hale and the subsequent research into contemporary fashions undertaken by the Frick, as we will see. This finding was exciting for me as it vindicated my contention in my PhD and in an essay published in 2003, ‘Negotiating Femininities: Petites Filles and Public Parks in Nineteenth-Century Paris,’ that the title was problematic, and that the central young woman represented in such expensive clothing could not have been a mother due to her loose hair, so it was an important moment (intellectually and personally) to see the infrared reflectogram of the underlying paint layers of Renoir’s canvas, and discover what lay underneath, as we will see.^[12]

Manet’s Le Chemin de fer (The Railway), 1873

With these thoughts in mind, we return to Manet’s Le Chemin de fer (1873, fig. 1), which was exhibited at the Salon of 1874 (it had been purchased by the celebrated baritone and art collector Jean-Baptiste Faure immediately upon completion, and was loaned to the Salon), and which both consternated and fascinated viewers, provoking ridicule and admiration.^[13] In spite of the title, the subject of the painting is not only the new railway and the spectacle of steam through the iron railings, but contemporary fashion and the female body. It seems astonishing that the young woman looking up as if having been engrossed in the act of reading should have been modelled by Victorine Meurent, who a decade previously, then in her late teens, had posed for Manet’s Olympia. Here, not naked, but fully clothed, and wearing the ‘latest [early] autumn fashion’ as noted by MaryAnne Stevens, curator of the 2013 Royal Academy of Arts exhibition ‘Manet; Portraying Life,’^[14] Victorine, herself an artist and musician, adopts not only the dress but the accessories and demeanour of a bourgeois teenager, une jeune fille honnête (and thus the contemporary cultural opposite of Olympia), waiting patiently for someone, it would seem (of course coincidentally the fictive courtesan Olympia would have spent much of her time waiting too).

The little girl beside her, perhaps posing as her sister, thought possibly to have been modelled by the daughter of Manet’s artist friend Alphonse Hirsch,^[15] stands with her back to the viewer, engrossed by the spectacle of modernity through the railings: of the train which has just passed, or which is approaching, and its cloud of steam. The location for the painting has been noted by Juliet Wilson-Bareau to be the narrow garden of the building where Hirsch had a studio on the newly built rue de Rome^[16] (in July 1872, Manet had moved into a studio on the opposite side of the tracks from this location, at 4 rue de Saint-Pétersbourg, the door and window of which are pictured in the painting’s top-left hand corner).^[17] Without this knowledge however, as viewers approaching the painting, we might imagine the girls to be waiting not in an enclosed space, but outside the railway station, which brings the notion of encounter, the unexpected encounters of the modern city, to the fore and piques our curiosity. As viewers, we note the little girl’s part in the spectacle which we are observing; her elegant dress finds its literary reflection in Zola’s portrayal of six-year old Pauline in Le Ventre de Paris published the same year, in 1873.^[18]

These two young female bodies are crowded with the viewer into a shallow foreground plane.^[19] Our proximity to the girls means that we feel we could reach out and touch the different fabrics of their clothes. The apparent relation of viewer to the girls seems to be one of spontaneous encounter: the little girl hasn’t yet noticed our presence. While we watch Victorine looking at us, facing us in Michael Fried’s terms,^[20] (appearing not ten years older but curiously younger than Olympia), our focus on the young girl’s dress, and her back, enhanced by the wide blue sash ‒ a view which also had featured prominently in Manet’s Musique aux Tuileries (1862) ‒ we can see that there are connections between the two different stages of girlhood and young womanhood depicted here. The unusual pose of the young girl, which would be altogether provocative were she older, and if we were to substitute brass bedposts for iron railings, nods in the direction of Manet’s toilette paintings, which reveal the undressed and half-dressed bodies of women perhaps not much older than the girl posed by Victorine. The younger girl may be oblivious here to questions of a future role, as wife and mother (or lover), but as both Charles Baudelaire in Le Peintre de la vie moderne  (1863) and Zola, with relation to Pauline suggest, little girls were learning to behave like little women from their first decade on.^[21] We will see this again with Renoir’s Promenade.

The fact that the status of these two female figures has been the subject of art-historical speculation indicates the key role fashion plays in determining identity in the public space. Popular hypotheses have posited that the older girl could be a mother or governess,^[22] but fashionably dressed as she is, she was much more likely to be positioned as an elder teenage sister (or friend, or relation) of the younger girl, due to her loose hair, and to the contemporary fashion for adolescent girls to wear their hair down, all fluffed up, as we see here and as we will see again in Renoir’s La Promenade. Of course, the two female figures positioned thus by Manet on his canvas, might not fictively know each other at all, and merely be waiting together in close proximity. However, the visual, pictorial, and spatial connections between the two are evident, the overlapping of their bodies (or more specifically the little girl’s left hand and Victorine’s hat); the overlapping of their skirts; the black ribbons worn as choker and hair band; the dangling earrings worn by both; Victorine’s long pleated cuffs and the folds in the little girl’s skirt.

Further complicating the matter of speculation over fashionable attire in the painting of modernity is the fact that in nineteenth-century Paris, fashionability was no longer the preserve of the wealthy, the mondain and demi-mondain elites. Recent changes wrought by industrialisation, mass production, and consumption on an unparalleled scale had changed the nature of human interactions within the public space due to the access across the social spectrum to the simulacra of high fashion in the form of mass-produced garments and accessories, as we see in Octave Uzanne’s Ornements de la Femme: L’Eventail – L’Ombrelle – Le Gant – Le Manchon (1883). Fashion journalists frequently lamented the bourgeois adoption of demi-mondain fashions, and a general confusion of the mobility of the signs of dress lead to popular anxiety regarding the ‘types’ of women – ‘honest’ or ‘dishonest’ – parading in such public spaces as the public park. These factors combine to make a painting such as Manet’s Le Printemps (Jeanne Demarsy) (1881, fig. 3), which resists our scrutiny, so highly decorative, tantalising, and demonstrative of a female power to deny the viewer/flâneur access, while wielding her arme du dehors, the parasol. ^[23]

Fig. 3. Édouard Manet, Le Printemps (Jeanne Demarsy), 1881, oil on canvas, 74 x 51.5 cm, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Courtesy The Getty Open Content Programme.

The Painting of Modernity

Any discussion of ‘the painting of modernity’ must consider the landmark studies in the field, which sought to identify the structures underlying the images of modernity as painted by Manet and the Impressionists, images which the influential art writer of the 1960s, Clement Greenberg identified as calling attention to the support, the flat surface of the canvas, and destroying the illusion of perspectival depth, presenting a rupture with past traditions of representation.^[24] I referred above to Fried’s theorising of Manet’s subjects facing us, which was developed over three decades from the late 1960s, resulting in Manet’s Modernism or the Face of Painting in the 1860s (1996). Fried’s concept of ‘facingness,’ ‘mutual facing,’ originated in his own formal art-historical concerns as opposed to academic rival T. J. Clark’s social art history. Fried focused on the ‘face’ of Manet’s paintings (both the face of the figure depicted, and the face (or surface) of the painting itself):

One might say that Manet wanted to make the painting itself turn toward and face the beholder… It is as though the frontality, the problematic spatial relationships, and finally what has been seen as the flatness of Manet’s paintings are at bottom just this facingness, this turning-toward.^[25]

It is as though Manet intuitively recognized… the ever-greater difficulty, verging by the 1850s on impossibility, of effectively negating or neutralizing the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld…, and as though he recognized too that it was therefore necessary to establish the beholder’s presence abstractly ‒ to build into the painting the separateness, distancedness, and mutual facing that had always characterized the painting-beholder relationship in its traditional, unreconstructed form…^[26]

In the equally important book The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (1984) social art historian T. J. Clark examined the painting of modernity by focusing on the nineteenth-century city; its spaces of spectacle, its commodity culture, and its class structures. However, in privileging the male gaze, Clark neglected gender issues at a time when the seminal work of feminist art historians Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock was challenging not only the exclusion of women artists from the canon, asking ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ (the title of Nochlin’s provocative 1971 essay) but reinstating women in history as spectators of art, a (not unproblematic) presence in the museum, when one considers the impact of Olympia, reflecting back to bourgeois husbands accompanied by their wives the double standards of the day, as Pollock pointed out in her seminal essay ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity’ (1988).^[27]

However, Pollock’s essay also defined nineteenth-century bourgeois Parisian women as not having the ability ‘to look, to stare, scrutinize or watch,’ and depicted the activity of moving around the city as ‘frightening’ and ‘morally dangerous.’^[28] She acknowledged that women could and did leave the home to go shopping, or to the park, but following the above suggestion, their presence in the public space was never normalised. However, the primary source material which I was researching in the Musée de la Mode‒Palais Galliera, Paris, suggested alternatives, and these alternatives were located within the culture of fashion, consumption and body adornment: I found that bourgeois women were actively creating their own communities: of readers, dress-makers, journalists, editors, centred around the activities of dressing the body for the spectacle of promenading.

Fig. 4. Laure Noël, Le Coquet, No. 22, Journal des Modes Spécial pour Couturières, Albert Éditeur, Paris, Imprimerie Leroy, Paris, July 1, 1869, steel engraving with hand colouring, 28.1 x 39.6 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Mrs. H.J. Bernheim, 1958. Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access Scholarly Content, www.metmuseum.org.

Fashion Journals and the Depiction of Public Space

Significantly, what emerged from my primary research of fashion journals was that fashionable bourgeois women were not only parading in the parks as the trophy wives of bourgeois husbands or the Madonna-like mothers of their children, but were instead dressing to meet the active looks of other women in the park space. In this activity, they were directors of their own performance, not objects of (the) male gaze(s). The radical restructuring and ‘greening’ of the city under Haussmann had indirectly created new spaces, public parks across the city, the rationale for which was hygienic, philanthropic and an attempt at social control, spaces in which bourgeois women could appear without compromise, with or without their children or husband.^[29]

Fashion journals were quick to depict this new urban space as prime site for the parading of fashions and for meetings of mothers and children or women and their female friends, with fashion plates departing from the nondescript garden settings of the 1850s to identifiable park spaces in the 1860s and beyond.^[30] This trend is of course echoed in the painting of modern life by Manet and the Impressionists through the 1860s and 1870s, and later with Georges Seurat, Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard (and in literature, with Baudelaire, Zola, Guy de Maupassant, and later, Marcel Proust); the painting/writing of a hybrid modernity which mixed respectable and demi-monde society and made the contemporary critical identification of types of female bodies on display part of an aesthetic guessing game.^[31]

Fig.  5. Georges Seurat, Study for ‘A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,’ 1884, oil on canvas, 70.5 x 104.1 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Bequest of Sam A. Lewisohn, 1951. Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access Scholarly Content, www.metmuseum.org.

The Public Park in Nineteenth-Century Paris

The park space appeared to be an ideal showcase for the parading of bourgeois fashions and family values while also of course being a hybrid site, one of entertainment, consumption and sexual encounter.^[32] Paris was a city of pleasure, as many contemporary guidebooks did not fail to note, sending off the male tourist in the right direction for sexual conquests. There was a resulting confusion in the public space of classes and ‘kinds’ of women who were all engaged in fashionable display (the nineteenth century was obsessed with naming types, in an attempt to control female behaviour, especially that of clandestine prostitutes, who were viewed as a threat to bourgeois genealogy, whereas state-regulated prostitution was widely tolerated as an essential public health measure).^[33] In the public parks however, one was to find wives, mothers, courtesans, prostitutes… the resulting confusion of types which so concerned contemporary commentators (and lead to wrongful arrests of respectable women for alleged soliciting) was directly related to the mobility of the signs of fashion and the consequences of mass-consumption and the ‘democratisation’ of fashion.^[34]

Women in the City

While Pollock’s essay has had a huge influence in art history (remaining a dominant model in feminist art history for almost three decades), in a note to the 1994 edition of her essay, she conceded that she ‘may have overstated the case that bourgeois women’s sexuality could not be articulated within these spaces’ and that ‘a great deal more research needs to be done…’^[35] This was the challenge that I took up in my PhD. Pollock’s paradigm, tremendously influential still, is a basis upon which later art-historical examinations of women’s potential agency in the city can be explored. This critical activity is still in its early stages:  Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough’s important essay collection The Invisible Flâneuse? Gender, public space, and visual culture in nineteenth-century Paris (2006) is a response not only to Pollock’s model, but to that of Janet Wollf, whose seminal essay (1990) had posited the inability of women to be flâneuses (roughly equivalent to strollers; Nochlin in her afterword to this collection notes the negative connotations of streetwalker, always assumed to be female).^[36]

While women could not roam the city with the incognito of the Baudelairean flâneur (due to the culture of scrutinising the female body, and to male uniformity in dress as opposed to constantly changing women’s fashions which emphasised and exaggerated the female form), my primary research suggested that there was a greater degree of normality about their movement in the city than had been suggested by earlier studies. (For her part, Steele had noted both the opacity and the restrictions of women’s experience of the city, in relation to writings which had emphasised the male urban experience.)^[37] D’Souza and McDonough suggest we take the ‘political impetus’ of Pollock’s model, while assimilating the challenges from outside art history, from film studies, urban history, literary theory (to this I would add fashion history), channelling them into our understanding of more complex spatial practices of women in the city, and tangentially, of the anxieties of the flâneur, the man-about-town art-historical studies had hitherto assumed to have the power of the deciding (purchasing) gaze together with freedom of movement in public spaces in nineteenth-century Paris.^[38] Essays by D’Souza, on department stores; Marni Kessler on the veil as fashionable and hygienic accessory; and Ruth E. Iskin on female consumption (developed in her important 2007 book Modern Women and Parisian Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting) exhibit this new critical understanding of women’s agency and movement in the nineteenth-century city.^[39]

To summarise: the mid-century developments of the fashion industry, the construction of its new outlets ‒ the department stores ‒ and its channels of expression, advertisement and communication in fashion journals, had led to the increased activity of promenading in public, whether as a family, as a mother with her children, or as a woman alone. The new public parks facilitated this new brand of urban leisure across the social spectrum. Of course, the hours allotted to promenading were restricted for the working classes, to Sundays for the most part, but for the first time, consumers across the social spectrum could participate in fashionable display. The public parks showcased the scrutiny not only of grown women, but of girls, who were equally targeted as consumers or at least as wearers of fashion by journals such as La Mode illustrée, significantly subtitled journal de mode et de la famille, and represented as apparently already perceiving the roles which would soon be thrust upon them (as we saw with Baudelaire and Zola) and now, with regard to the Frick Exhibition, Renoir.

Renoir’s La Promenade, 1875-76, (The Frick Collection, New York)

Fig. 6. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, La Promenade, 1875-76, oil on canvas (lined), 170.2 x 108.3 cm, The Frick Collection, New York. Henry Clay Frick Bequest. Copyright The Frick Collection.

Renoir’s La Promenade (1875-76) is a painting of a young woman and two little girls, all exquisitely dressed, and resembling one another, in the setting of a public park, probably the Parc Monceau in Paris’s affluent residential Monceau quartier north-west of the Opera (see fig.2). In spite of the loose hair of the eldest female figure, the painting was assumed to represent a mother and her daughters by critics and art historians, from the outset. I found this identification problematic. But what was the alternative? Known variously as Mother and Children, Promenade (Mother and Children), and La Jeune Mère (Promenade), by the late 1990s when I came to study it, there was very little documentary material relating to the painting, and even the dating of the work varied according to different sources.^[40]

Art historians, focusing on the resemblance of the three female figures, had written about the representation of a mother and daughters.^[41] The Frick’s documentation noted a credible anecdote that the models were a nanny and her charges, the daughters of a ‘prosperous family of Italian origin,’ whom Renoir might have met in the Square de la Trinité near his studio.^[42] For a nanny, the eldest female figure seemed to me too richly dressed, but her loose hair, emphasised by Renoir, strongly resisted the description of mother when respectable women did not wear their hair down in public after they were married, certainly not after the teenage years. Perhaps the foreign origin of this family/nanny allowed for a less circumspect dress-code, but the identification remained problematic for me.^[43]

As recently as 2007 and 2010, art historians Anna Green (Ashgate, 2007) and Greg M. Thomas (Yale University Press, 2010) referred to the painting as representing a mother and children, without noting the difficulty associated with the supposed mother’s hairstyle.^[44] However, 2012 brought conclusive evidence of this ‘difficulty,’ and by the time of the Frick exhibition, all had been revealed to the conservators and curators working on the project. This truly was a rare art-historical discovery.^[45]

Prior to the exhibition, technical examination through infrared reflectography ‒ a conservation technique used for viewing ‘under-drawing and the early paint stages of a work, using a camera equipped with an infra-red sensitive detector,’^[46] ‒ had revealed two or perhaps three additional fully realised figures in the left background of Renoir’s painting, as we see in the infrared reflectogram.^[47] This very significant discovery was followed up with detailed fashion analysis to ascertain more about the identification of the female figures represented here. For me ‒ and now the Frick ‒ the young woman depicted could not have been conceived as the ‘mother’ of the assumed title (we now know that the painting acquired this descriptive title following its deposit at Durand-Ruel in 1891; Renoir had initially exhibited it simply as La Promenade at the Second Impressionist exhibition in 1876).^[48] In the reflectogram revealing the underlying paint layers, we can see two or possibly three figures, likely to have been the actual mother of the three girls, their nurse and baby sibling (in swaddling blanket in the arms of the nurse), in the left background, behind the central grouping of three girls, the assumed ‘mother’ and children.

Detailed fashion analysis was carried out by the Frick, including the cross-referencing of fashion plates from 1875-76, to reveal that the young woman whom art historians had for so long assumed to be a mother, was in Renoir’s initial conception at least, an elder sister, in her late teens. When compared with Manet’s Chemin de fer as Bailey suggests (I would also add Morisot’s Bois de Boulogne (1893), depicting her fifteen-year old daughter Julie^[49]), we can see how the long fluffed-up hairstyle of Renoir’s central young woman was typical of the style then worn by adolescent girls, rather than wealthy bourgeois mothers.^[50] In terms of the analysis of the actual (but now invisible) mother figure: as noted by Bailey, she appears to be wearing a voilette mouchetée, which we see in Renoir’s Jeune femme à la voilette (1875-76), the dotted veil being a highly fashionable accessory for elegant bourgeois women, appearing repeatedly in Manet’s Musique aux Tuileries for example.

To conclude: we have seen how, far from being an ancillary point of linkage, fashion is an essential component in understanding the iconic paintings of modernity, as relevant to the study of Impressionism as any other of the elements previously associated with the movement: light, colour, rapid brushwork, pleinairisme. In 2012 and 2013, for several world-class museums, fashion became the key element in a new understanding of the painting of modernity: this is a decisive shift in curatorial practice; and hugely significant for art and fashion history.

Bibliography

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———. ‘“[Paris] s’offre à vos regards et vous sollicite”: Pleasure in the Parks: Women, Travel Guides, and Nineteenth-Century Paris.’ In Cross-Cultural Travel: Papers from the Royal Irish Academy Symposium on Literature and Travel, edited by Jane Conroy, 239-250. New York: Peter Lang, 2003.

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———. Modern Women and Parisian Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

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———. ‘Robert Carsen, Directeur Artistique et Scenographe [‘L’Impressionnisme et la Mode’]. Video posted on Musée d’Orsay YouTube channel, 16 January 2013. Length 3:04. Accessed 1 February 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zR-tZx4ZXk .

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———. Paris Fashion: A Cultural History. New York–Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

———. ‘Is Fashion Art?’ Keynote lecture to mark the opening of the exhibition ‘Reflecting Fashion: Art and Fashion since Modernism’ at the Mumok (Museum of Modern Art), Vienna. Video. Length 46:17. Accessed 1 February 2015. http://www.fitnyc.edu/13673.asp .

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Notes

[1] See Émile Zola, La Bête humaine, in Les Rougon-Macquart: Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire IV (Paris : Gallimard, la Pléiade, 1966).

[2] See Françoise Cachin et al., Manet 1832-1883 (exhibition catalogue) (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and H. N. Abrams, 1983), 340-341.

[3] Cachin et al., Manet 1832-1883, 340-341.

[4] See Suzy Menkes, ‘Gone Global: Is Fashion Really Art?’ New York Times, Special Report: Fashion, 4 July 2011, accessed 1 February 2015, http://nyti.ms/1HaKkh0 . On June 15, 2012, Valerie Steele gave the keynote speech ‘Is Fashion Art?’ to mark the opening of the exhibition Reflecting Fashion: Art and Fashion since Modernism at the Mumok (Museum of Modern Art), Vienna. See Valerie Steele, ‘Is Fashion Art?’ Keynote lecture to mark the opening of the exhibition ‘Reflecting Fashion: Art and Fashion since Modernism’ at the Mumok (Museum of Modern Art), Vienna, video, length 46:17, accessed 1 February 2015, http://www.fitnyc.edu/13673.asp .

[5] See Gloria Groom et al., L’Impressionnisme et la Mode (exhibition catalogue) (Paris: Musée d’Orsay–Skira–Flammarion, 2012); Colin B. Bailey, Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting (exhibition catalogue) (New Haven–London: Yale University Press in association with The Frick Collection, New York, 2012).

[6] My thanks to Valerie Steele and to Gloria Groom for reading the paper and for their supportive feedback.

[7] Valerie Steele, cited by Suzy Menkes, ‘The Freud of Fashion,’ [profile of Valerie Steele], New York Times, 10 February 2012, accessed 1 February 2015, http://nyti.ms/1HDW26l .

[8] Steele, cited by Rosalind Early in an interview to coincide with Steele’s Fashion Lab YARN lecture, on 1 April 2012, hosted by Craft Alliance, at Washington University, published in the April 2012 edition of St Louis Magazine. See Rosalind Early, interview with Valerie Steele, ‘Smartly Dressed: Valerie Steele, one of the Fashion World’s Top Intellectuals, Comes to St. Louis,’ St. Louis Magazine, April 2012, accessed 1 February 2015, http://www.stlmag.com/St-Louis-Magazine/April-2012/Smartly-Dressed-Valerie-Steele-One-of-the-Fashion-Worlds-Top-Intellectuals-Comes-to-St-Louis/ . See also Alexander Cavaluzzo, ‘Is Fashion Art, Style Icons & Other Topics with the Director of the Museum at FIT,’ interview with Steele, blogpost to coincide with the opening of the Daphne Guinness exhibition at the Museum at FIT, September 2011 to January 2012, posted on the blog Hyperallergic: Sensitive to art and its discontents, 31 August 2011, accessed 1 February 2015, http://hyperallergic.com/34318/valerie-steele-daphne-guinness-museum-fit/ .

[9] See Valerie Steele, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History (New York–Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from the Victorian Era to the Jazz Age (New York–Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

[10] Interview with Gloria Groom on the occasion of the opening of the ‘Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity’ exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago: see Mark Bazer, interview with Gloria Groom, ‘Talking “Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity” with the Art Institute’s Gloria Groom,’ for The Interview Show Chicago, recorded June 7 2013 at The Hideout, Chicago, published online 27 June 2013, video, length 15:10, accessed 1 February 2015, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrwK1TDlDw8 . See also interview (in French) with Groom: Musée d’Orsay, ‘Gloria Groom, commissaire de l’exposition,’ video posted on Musée d’Orsay YouTube channel, 16 January 2013, length 3:35, accessed 1 February 2015, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5rHa3SKDLA .

[11] The Musée d’Orsay video cited in the note above (‘Gloria Groom, commissaire de l’exposition’) shows the excitement of Groom as Manet’s Nana is hung; such a genuine reaction is very telling. On the staging of the exhibition, see also Musée d’Orsay, ‘Robert Carsen, Directeur Artistique et Scenographe [‘L’Impressionnisme et la Mode’], video posted on Musée d’Orsay YouTube channel, 16 January 2013. Length 3:04, accessed 1 February 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zR-tZx4ZXk .

[12] See Sinéad Helena Furlong, ‘Women in the Parks of Paris: Painting and Writing the Female Body, 1848-1900,’ (PhD diss., University of Dublin, Trinity College, 2001) and ‘Negotiating Femininities: Petites Filles and Public Parks in Nineteenth-Century Paris,’ in Little Girls; Les Petites filles, special edition of Tessera, Vol. 35, Fall/Automne 2003, 9-27, available at http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/tessera/article/view/25503, accessed 1 February 2015. See also my book, Sinéad Furlong-Clancy, The Depiction and Description of the Female Body in Nineteenth-Century French Art, Literature, and Society: Women in the Parks of Paris 1848-1900 (New York: The Mellen Press, 2014).

[13] For the critical reception of the painting, see Cachin et al., Manet 1832-1883, 340-342;  also Juliet Wilson-Bareau, Manet, Monet, and the Gare Saint-Lazare (exhibition catalogue) (New Haven–London, Yale University Press and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D. C., 1998), 49-55.

[14] See MaryAnne Stevens, Manet: Portraying Life (exhibition catalogue) (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2012), 198.

[15] See Cachin et al., Manet 1832-1883, 340. See also Stevens, Manet, 198. Juliet Wilson-Bareau notes that the source of this suggestion was Adolphe Tabarant, but also that there is no known evidence to support this assertion. See Wilson-Bareau, Manet, Monet, and the Gare Saint-Lazare, 185, n.32.

[16] Wilson-Bareau, Manet, Monet, and the Gare Saint-Lazare, 44-5.

[17] Wilson-Bareau, Manet, Monet, and the Gare Saint-Lazare, 47.

[18] Emile Zola, Le Ventre de Paris, in Œuvres complètes I (Paris: Gallimard, La Pléiade, 1960), 601-895.

[19] Stevens writes of an ‘uncomfortably narrow and immediate foreground plane.’ Stevens, Manet, 2012, 198.

[20] I discuss Michael Fried’s concept of facing below.

[21] Children, according to Baudelaire, played out in public parks the ‘comédie donnée à domicile par leurs parents.’ See Charles Baudelaire, Le Peintre de la vie moderne, in Œuvres complètes II (Paris: Gallimard, La Pléiade, 1976), 719.

[22] See Wilson-Bareau, Manet, Monet, and the Gare Saint-Lazare, 47-49; Jane Mayo Roos, ‘Manet and the Impressionist Moment’ in Perspectives on Manet, ed. Therese Dolan (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2012), 88.

[23] Octave Uzanne refers to the ombrelle as an arme du dehors: ‘L’Ombrelle – Le Parasol – Le Parapluie’ in Octave Uzanne, Les Ornements de la Femme: L’Eventail – L’Ombrelle – Le Gant – Le Manchon. Edition complète et définitive (Paris: Librairies–Imprimeries Réunies, 1892 (1883)), 188.

[24] See Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting,’ (1965), in Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, ed. Francis Frascina et al. (London: Harper and Row, in association with The Open University, 1986 (1982)), 5-10.

[25] Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism, or the Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago‒London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 479, n.96, cited by Stephen Z. Levine, ‘Reconstructing Manet’ in Dolan, Perspectives on Manet, 195.

[26] Michael Fried, Courbet’s Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 200, cited by Levine, ‘Reconstructing Manet,’ 197.

[27] See Linda Nochlin, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ in Linda Nochlin, Women, Art and Power and Other Essays (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994 (1989)) (USA, Harper and Row, 1988); Griselda Pollock, ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,’ in Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London–New York: Routledge, 1994 (1988)).

[28] See Pollock, ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,’ 69, 71.

[29] On the transformation of Paris under Napoleon III and Haussmann, see for example Robert L. Herbert’s landmark study of Manet, the Impressionists, and nineteenth-century Paris, Impressionism: Art, Leisure and Parisian Society (New Haven–London: Yale University Press, 1991 (1988)); John Dixon Hunt on the ‘greening’ of the city, John Dixon Hunt, ‘French Impressionist Gardens and the Ecological Picturesque,’ in John Dixon Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture (Cambridge, USA‒London, UK: The MIT Press, 1992), 243-283.

[30] Steele had noted the expansion of fashion-plate illustration from the domestic interior and enclosed private garden to include walking in the park, ‘window-shopping, walking in the country, at the seaside, at church, or in an art museum,’ with the addition of social settings of evening receptions, boxes at the Opera, and so on (Steele. Paris Fashion, 117-8). I was fascinated by these aspects of fashion journals documenting material, urban, and social culture, and my research included a tracing of the evolution of the fashion-plate depiction of the garden space from private garden to public park, complete with park architecture (benches, bridges, and so on) and activities such as the Guignol (puppet shows) for children by the late 1870s.

[31] Christopher Prendergast’s analysis in his chapter ‘A Walk in the Park’ notes the impact of ‘mass confection and the grand magasin’ to the growing uncertainties of identification of ‘types’ in the city. See Christopher Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century (Oxford UK–Cambridge USA, Blackwell, 1995 (1992)).

[32] The public park in nineteenth-century Paris was an area explored by Herbert in his chapter ‘Parks, Racetracks and Gardens,’ see Herbert, Impressionism, 140-193, and as noted above by Christopher Prendergast in a chapter entitled ‘A Walk in the Park,’ Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century, 164-188. See also Greg M. Thomas, ‘Women in public: the display of femininity in the parks of Paris’ in The Invisible Flâneuse? Gender, public space, and visual culture in nineteenth-century Paris, ed. Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 32-48 and ‘A Walk in the Park’ in Greg M. Thomas, Impressionist Children: Childhood, Family and Modern Identity in French Art (New Haven–London: Yale University Press, 2010), 125-155.

[33] Alain Corbin’s study of the history of prostitution is an essential source: Alain Corbin, Les Filles de noce: misère sexuelle et prostitution aux XIXe et XXe siècles (Paris: Aubier Montagne, 1978).

[34] Georges d’Avenel (1855-1939) wrote a series of articles which appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes between 1894 and 1905 and were collectively entitled ‘Le Mécanisme de la vie moderne.’ In them he discussed the concept of the democratisation of luxury. See Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley–Los Angeles–London: University of California Press, 1982), 94-103. On wrongful arrests, see Corbin, Les Filles de noce, 329; also Furlong ‘Women in the Parks of Paris,’ 166-184, particularly 167, n.129; Furlong, ‘“[Paris] s’offre à vos regards et vous sollicite”: Pleasure in the Parks: Women, Travel Guides, and Nineteenth-Century Paris,’ in Cross-Cultural Travel: Papers from the Royal Irish Academy Symposium on Literature and Travel, ed. Jane Conroy (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), 246 and

Furlong-Clancy, The Depiction and Description of the Female Body, 45-46, 82, 129, 245, 261-62.

[35] See Pollock, ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,’ 79, note: ‘I may have overstated the case that bourgeois women’s sexuality could not be articulated within these spaces. (…) A great deal more research needs to be done before any statements can be made without the danger of feminists merely rehearsing and confirming the official discourse of masculine ideologues on female sexualities.’ (With reference to C. Smith-Rosenberg, ‘Hearing women’s words: a feminist reconstruction of history,’ in her book Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Knopf, 1985).

[36] See Janet Wolff, ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity’ in Janet Wolff, Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 34-50; also her ‘Gender and the haunting of cities (or, the retirement of the flâneur),’ in The Invisible Flâneuse? Gender, public space, and visual culture in nineteenth-century Paris (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 18-31; Linda Nochlin, ‘Afterword,’ in D’Souza and McDonough, The Invisible Flâneuse?, 172-177.

[37] See Steele, Paris Fashion, 161-162: ‘Most of what has been written about Paris has emphasized the male experience of the metropolis (…). The significance of the metropolis for women is more opaque.’

[38] On ‘political impetus,’ see Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough, ‘Introduction,’ in D’Souza and McDonough The Invisible Flâneuse?, 11. Kaja Silverman’s Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992) was of course a major challenge to such conceptualising of male power in the city. See Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York–London: Routledge, 1992); see also Stephen Kern, Eyes of Love: the Gaze in English and French Paintings and Novels 1840-1900 (London: Reaktion, 1996), 12-13.

[39] See Aruna D’Souza, ‘Why the Impressionists never painted the department store,’ in D’Souza and McDonough, The Invisible Flâneuse?, 129-147; Marni Kessler, ‘Dusting the surface, or the bourgeoise, the veil, and Haussmann’s Paris’, in D’Souza and McDonough, The Invisible Flâneuse?, 49-63; Ruth E. Iskin, ‘The flâneuse in French fin-de-siècle posters: advertising images of modern women in Paris,’ in D’Souza and McDonough, The Invisible Flâneuse?, 113-128 and Ruth E. Iskin, Modern Women and Parisian Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

[40] While the painting, following the Frick tradition, was generally known as Mother and Children, Fezzi, Darses and Henry’s 1985 catalogue called it La Jeune Mère (Promenade), see Elda Fezzi et al., Tout l’œuvre peint de Renoir: période impressionniste 1869-1883 (Paris: Flammarion, 1985), 154. Christopher Prendergast called it La Promenade: femme et enfants although he does not discuss his reasons for so doing (Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century, 174-175). The dating of the painting was equally varied; Fezzi, Darses and Henry had dated the work c. 1874, as had Prendergast. The Frick Collection, likening it to the later portrait of Mme Charpentier and her Children (1878), which belongs to the neighbouring Metropolitan Museum of Art, had in the 1990 catalogue dated it c. 1876-1878. See entry for ‘Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mother and Children’ in The Frick Collection/Charles Ryskamp et al., Paintings from The Frick Collection (New York: Harry N. Abrams–The Frick Collection, 1990 (n.p.).

[41] On the critical reception of the work, see Bailey, Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting, 87-88.

[42] See entry for ‘Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mother and Children’ in The Frick Collection/ Ryskamp et al., Paintings from The Frick Collection (n.p.).

[43] See Furlong ‘Women in the Parks of Paris,’ 205-208, 230-232; and Furlong ‘Negotiating Femininities,’ 15-17, 21-23.

[44] Thomas discusses Renoir’s Promenade, also calling it Mother and Children, and ‘one of Renoir’s earliest maternal scenes,’ see Thomas, Impressionist Children, 47-49. Anna Green looks at Renoir’s Promenade, calling it Mother and Children, in her book French Paintings of Childhood and Adolescence, 1848-1886 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 143-144. For both Thomas and Green, Renoir’s Promenade is discussed as presenting a mother and daughters in the park. Thomas writes that the ‘fur-trimmed cape of the woman in the foreground suggests she is the girls’ youthful mother rather than nanny,’ Impressionist Children, 47. No comment is made regarding the eldest girl’s loose hair by either writer.

[45] The following analysis is drawn from the chapter ‘La Promenade,’ in Bailey, Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting, 84-107, with particular reference to ‘Revelations of Technical Examination,’ 97-101, as regards the infrared reflectogram.

[46] On conservation techniques and the technical examination of paintings, see Frank Zuccari and Allison Langley, ‘Seurat’s Working Process: The Compositional Evolution of La Grande Jatte,’ in Herbert et al., Seurat and the Making of La Grande Jatte (exhibition catalogue) (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago–Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 178-195.

[47] See the infrared reflectogram in the short exhibition video, The Frick Collection, ‘Renoir: A look beneath the surface,’ posted on The Frick Collection YouTube channel, 6 February 2012, length 3:20, accessed 1 March 2015, https://youtu.be/Oy6pmpDRiiA . See also Bailey, Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting, 98.

[48] See Bailey, Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting, 107.

[49] At the first presentation of this paper at Trinity College Dublin, April 2013, David Scott thought of James McNeill Whistler’s Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl (1862) as a further example of the trend.

[50] See Bailey, Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting, 97.