“Eighteenth-century European, metropolitan society developed an elaborate ideal of femininity, constituted by notions of private, domestic virtues, and culturally regulated through literature, conduct books and other media. Within the discourses governing female behaviour, dominant gaze polities were more rigorously defined along gendered lines. The ideal woman could not direct a prolonged, searching look at a man without impropriety. That is, women who did not conform to such cultural limits were excluded from polite society, and considered either uncultured, unnaturally powerful or immoral.”
In this time period women’s “real” work was serving their families. They had to bother about cooking, housekeeping and taking care of their children. …show more content…
This was probably because a woman artist needed a man as a patronage, and who would support a female artist in the eighteenth-century? Mostly relatives. And this is another example for male guidance for female in arts. A female artist without a dominant male behind her cannot prevail.
Another interesting aspect is the aspect of classes. Aristocracy has always provided the lion’s share of the patronage and the audience for art, but not really the artists. In the case of making the art itself they only became respectable amateurs. (Of course exception proves the rule, for instance Toulouse-Lautrec who was an aristocrat but he transmuted in to the ranks of marginal because of his deformity.) Could it be that the true talent is missing from aristocrats just as like from women? Or rather, is it not that kinds of expectations are required from them. Probably the answer is the latter.
“Within such an imbalanced visual economy, portraiture was a problematic professional pursuit for women to whom such ideals of comportment were thought to apply; and because the behavioural codes focused upon the ocular submission of women to men, especially troublesome to the female portraitist was the heterosexual …show more content…
The model depends upon the artist, since him or her (the artist) pays the model to serve as an object of investigation. The complication comes when the artist’s and the sitter’s sex differ. Since both the painter and the sitter are responsible for the success, the portrait painter runs a risk with the opposite sex sitter. In order to proceed as a painter, the male painter has to control his desires and resist temptation. By transferring his sexual impulses directly onto the canvas, the painter forms an image upon which he can now gratify his desires and