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Artistic Endeavour versus Decency: Women Art Students and the Male Nude Model in Early Nineteenth-Century Paris - Page 2

© Jessica Cresseveur

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What is interesting about Deverzey's painting is that it serves as evidence to today's scholar that at least some women had access to means of learning accurate representation of the male nude. However, adjustments had to be made for public exhibition. The placement of the male torso on the shelf is interesting, considering that women were often encouraged to maintain a downcast gaze as a sign of modesty. It is almost as if the scene has been "sanitised" for the nineteenth-century viewer, inferring that the women, being proper ladies, will never see the torso, and even if an eye should accidentally wander upwardly, it would not see anything denoting sexual difference, as the genitalia are well-hidden.

Although early nineteenth-century Paris witnessed a temporary acceptance of women in the public sphere, mainstream culture still viewed women as delicate creatures to be sheltered from such topics as sex. If parents learned that their daughters were being exposed to such "debauchery," many of them would have petitioned for art education to be closed at least to unmarried women. Therefore, I conclude that evidence of nude study for women in Paris before the late nineteenth century remains sketchy due to a contemporary effort to pacify the public, thus allowing any such classes to continue.

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Notes

(1) Vivian Cameron, Woman as Image and Image-Maker in Paris during the French Revolution Ph.D thesis (Yale University, 1983): 74-75.

(2) E.J. Delécluze, Louis David: Son école et son temps (Paris, 1983): 33-38.

(3) Cameron, 76-77.

(4) Gen Doy, Women and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century France, 1800-1852 (London, 1998): 97.

(5) It was apparently less controversial, however, for married women to study two- and three-dimensional replicas of the male nude. For more information, see Doy's discussion of Angélique Mongez's Theseus and Pirithous p. 111.

(6) Doy, 98.

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