Course 17 – Summer School on Campus
Monday 6 – Friday 10 July 2026
Dr Rose Pickering
£695
Course Description:
This course examines how women became a central presence in late nineteenth-century French art. Across avant-garde painting, more traditional Salon works and commercial advertising, artists repeatedly turned to women of all social classes as subjects, using their bodies and appearances to explore the experience of modern urban life. The course asks what these depictions might reveal about modern Paris and considers the extent to which they reflect social reality or male fantasy.
Focusing on women’s growing visibility in the city, the course traces the emergence of new social types, including the fashionable Parisienne. Fashion and commerce provide key frameworks for analysis, supported by the writings of Baudelaire and Zola, which reveal Paris as a deeply gendered urban environment. Representations of women from this period range from the idealised society figures of Jean Béraud and James Tissot to the barmaids, laundresses, dancers and sex workers depicted by Manet, Degas, Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec, raising questions about the relationship between artist and model, as well as feminine subjectivity and agency.
The course also addresses shifting representations of masculinity through the work of artists such as Caillebotte. It will also consider women artists, including Morisot and Cassatt, whose representations of domestic life offer alternatives to dominant male perspectives. The course concludes with a close study of Symbolist art in Paris, exploring the tension between idealised visions of the femme fatale and saintly, virginal women. Works by Nabis artists, especially Édouard Vuillard, provide a counterpoint to the heightened Symbolist fantasies of painters such as Gustave Moreau and Paul Gauguin, perhaps offering a more realistic representation of modern women’s experience.
Lecturer's Biography
Dr Rose Pickering is an Art Historian who focuses on nineteenth and twentieth-century French visual culture with a specialist interest in word and image relations. Her PhD project, ‘Édouard Vuillard’s Representations of Women, 1890-1940: Modernity, Femininity and Proust’, explored a word-image connection between Édouard Vuillard’s artwork and Marcel Proust’s novel, À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927). In 2024, she organised a conference on word and image relations with King’s College London and The Courtauld. She has taught widely on British, American and European modern art and is currently a Teaching Fellow in Art History at The Courtauld.