Projecting Fictions: Women in Art

But it really struck me one day when I was walking through the galleries of 19th-century France. Painting after painting featured women performing quiet everyday tasks or engaged in something more spectacular. There was Renoir’s elegant portrait of a bourgeois lady embroidering beside a vivid bouquet and Degas’s bustling backstage scene of ballerinas preparing for their grand debut.

Though I was captivated by the luminous, dreamlike hues, there was a notable sense of intimacy in these scenes, as if I had accidentally stepped into a private moment—catching these women entirely absorbed in their own worlds. And yet I knew so little about these worlds.

Though women in that era were often subjects for painters—from academic classicists to Impressionists—they often served as canvases for exploration rather than as celebrations of individuality. Take Degas’s Morning Bath, which seems to depict a spontaneous, unscripted moment. Here, a woman steps into her bathtub, framed by a casually disheveled bed that separates her from the viewer. One of the premises of Impressionism, after all, was to illustrate scenes of everyday life.

She seems unaware that this private moment is being captured by the artist. The immediacy of the moment adds to the illusion of intimacy. 

Other compositions are more carefully composed and choreographed, placing models in fantastical settings, designed to create a theatrical illusion. Consider Jules Joseph Lefebvre’s renowned academic work Odalisque.

This reclining nude is draped against a dark red blanket in a dim, luxurious interior. The title, Odalisque, refers to an enslaved chambermaid or courtesan in an Ottoman harem. By her feet are golden plates piled with fruit, pieces of blue-and-white porcelain, and an ambiguous Japanese or Chinese incense burner. Together, they create a European fantasy of the Orient that makes the viewer feel complicit by simply looking at it. 

Similarly, in Women with Fans, Manet paints the celebrated socialite Nina de Callias against another Orientalist setting, one that is historically incongruous. He juxtaposes the round and utilitarian Japanese uchiwa fans against a luxurious golden screen with a flower and bird motif, a combination that would never exist in its original Japanese cultural context.

A close friend of Manet, Nina de Callias is adorned with imported luxury accessories and garments from Algeria and Asia as she reclines in front of the Japanese screen. Rather than a named portrait, she becomes the anonymous “woman with fan,” personifying the Parisian obsession with “exotic” cultures from Asia.  

Of course, this perspective in relation to female portraits is not unique to 19th-century European art. In the galleries of Japanese prints, I see the work of Kitagawa Utamaro (1753–1806), a master of ukiyo-e woodblock prints, whose images offer a look into the realm of the pleasure district, Yoshiwara.

Working under the auspices of Tsutaya Juzaburo’s influential publishing house, Utamaro cultivated a persona as a “tsu 通” (aficionado), skillfully presenting an insider’s view of courtesan life and fashion that resonated with both his male and female patrons. In his celebrated series The Twelve Hours in Yoshiwara (Seirō jūni toki tsuzuki), Utamaro captures a day in the life of courtesans through 12 meticulously crafted scenes—each corresponding to one of the 12 traditional hours in the Jikkan Jūnishi (Terrestrial Branches) system, which divides the day and night into 12 time periods of roughly two hours each.

While the series documents the daily rituals within Yoshiwara, it simultaneously offers an exclusive perspective into private, unguarded moments. 

As I look at these Japanese renderings of women, I find myself considering the lives behind the exquisite facades. Behind the veneer of delicate beauty lie histories marked by hardship—courtesans who endured violence, coercion, and the constant threat of disease. The same questions arise when I look at the French models, whose names I do not know, and whose realities are veiled by aesthetics. All of these figures feel at once vividly present and hauntingly absent—we see only an illusion that obscures their true selves. In standing in front of them, I cannot shake the unsettling sense that I, too, am complicit in the act of erasing their identities.

—Yuheng (Peter) Deng, McMullan Arts Leadership Curatorial Intern, Arts of Asia

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