Painted Face

While a painted portrait usually seems to need little explanation, a closer look may reveal that its meaning and even its subject are far more complex than expected. This book charts for the first time the history of French female portraiture from its heyday in the early nineteenth century to its demise in the early twentieth century. Tamar Garb focuses on six canonic paintings and how they illuminate evolving social attitudes and aesthetic concerns in France over the course of the century. The author builds the discussion around paintings by Ingres, Manet, Cassatt, Cezanne, Picasso and Matisse, beginning with Ingres's idealized portrait of Mme de Sennones and ending with Matisse's elegiac last portrait of his wife. During the hundred years that separate these works, the female portrait went from being the ideal genre for the expression of painting's capacity to describe and embellish 'nature', to the prime locus of its refusal to do so. Picasso's Cubism, and specifically Ma Jolie, provides the fulcrum of this shift. Garb dislodges prevailing myths about what portraits mean and whom they picture, and she shows the remarkable extent to which portraits can offer rich insights into the social and artistic settings in which they are created.