The Body in Nineteenth Century Art
Andrew Marvick
Associate Professor of Art History
Department of Art and Design
Southern Utah University
The Body in Nineteenth Century Art
Treatments of the body as a subject in art during the nineteenth century varied greatly. In early Victorian England very few painters—the York-based artist William Etty
Links to an external site. is nearly unique in this respect—dared make the female nude the central theme of his work; and he succeeded only by making sure to place his figures within thematic or narrative contexts deemed morally acceptable by a conservative public. The nude appeared in British art with increasing frequency as the century progressed, but was nearly always cloaked, so to speak, in the robes of antique narrative—the Toilet of Venus, for example, or Susanna and the Elders. By the end of the century, narrative pretexts for the depiction of the nude in late Victorian London art galleries were contrived as a matter of course, and a deeply ingrained hypocrisy with regard to sexual mores, symptomatic of Victorian society in general, was duly reflected in the paintings that appeared in the huge annual Royal Academy
Links to an external site. shows. (It is important to remind ourselves that neither the formal and pictorial quality nor the artistic originality of Victorian art was in any way lessened by such points of thematic weakness.)
In Paris, however, the reception of the nude was far less judgmental, and this more liberal attitude resulted in a much broader variety of treatments of the body in French art. When in 1830 the Romantic Eugène Delacroix
Links to an external site. presented a grandly idealized female figure in a state of sensual semi-nudity in Liberty Leading the People
Links to an external site., the general response from critics and public alike found fault with her appearance on grounds of bad taste, not immorality. During the 1820s and 1830s both Delacroix and his rival in the neo-classical camp, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Links to an external site., regularly explored themes of female sexual enslavement: the harem girl, or odalisk, was a particular favorite of Ingres even as late as the 1860s.
By that time, however, sexual hypocrisy in Paris society had been openly depicted in two break-through paintings by the Realist Édouard Manet
Links to an external site.: Luncheon on the Grass
Links to an external site. (1862-1863) and Olympia
Links to an external site. (1863). These deliberately provocative images of female figures in the context of male sexual patronage constituted a kind of exposé of the unofficial institution of sexism and male sexual license in modern Parisian society.
It is a mark of the difference between British and French nineteenth-century societies, however, that the scandals generated by Manet's two tours-de-force actually benefited his career, and encouraged more artists to seek new routes to notoriety through the exploitation of women as subjects of their work. The Realist
Links to an external site. painter Gustave Courbet
Links to an external site. blatantly depicted the female nude in explicit, full-frontal nudity within the flimsy narrative context of ancient Lesbos; and in a long series of paintings depicting young women and girls of Tahiti, the Post-Impressionist
Links to an external site. Paul Gauguin
Links to an external site. set forth a template for sexually objectified women as subjects of fin-de-siècle ("end-of-century") art, in which the young, sexually alluring but often threatening female figure—the "femme fatale
Links to an external site."—was a frequent thematic focal point.
By the close of the century the female nude was appearing regularly in both highly idealized form (as, for example, in the many nubile maidens who populated—sometimes amid a throng of floating cupids—the canvases of William Adolphe Bouguereau
Links to an external site., the leading French classical Academic painter of the era) and as the focus of bluntly realistic modern art. (See, for example, the Impressionist
Links to an external site. Edgar Degas
Links to an external site.'s unflinching visual record of Paris brothels which he executed in a series of monotypes that were exhibited after the artist's death.) By 1900 the sexual availability of young, attractive women was a common, almost hackneyed theme in European art, and conditions were ripe for a more self-aware probing of the objectification of women over the next few decades.