In 1870s France, upper-class women were supposed to be artists. As Ingrid Pfeiffer, a curator at Frankfurt’s Schirn Kunsthalle writes in her introduction to Women Impressionists, ladies of that era were expected to “devote their leisure hours to music making, drawing or watercolor painting.” Pfeiffer adds that Impressionism, the most avant-garde style of the day, was even thought to be inherently feminine, because it required sensuous paint handling, attention to the play of light and the copious use of white. Why, then, do we recognize only a handful of female Impressionists?

As you might guess, 19th-century France wasn’t an easy place for women to have actual careers—as painters or anything else. Those who found work as bartenders or in similar positions were portrayed (often in Impressionist pictures painted by men) as getting their kicks from helping the guys have fun. In this context, it’s remarkable that the artists Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzalès and Marie Bracquemond got as far as they did. This collection of essays and finely reproduced images—published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name, which travels from the Kunsthalle to San Francisco’s Palace of the Legion of Honor this month—devotes well-deserved attention to the careers of these four female Impressionists.

When Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) met Édouard Manet, in 1868, she’d already had several pieces accepted for an official Salon. Contrary to popular belief, she was never Manet’s student. He did, however, have a significant influence on her, and she married his younger brother, Eugène, with whom she had a daughter. A smallish painting of Julie Manet is the focus of the critique of Morisot in Women Impressionists contributed by Linda Nochlin, also the author of the ironically titled 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” In her discussion of Wet Nurse and Baby (Julie Manet), 1879, Nochlin finds parallels between employing a wet nurse and Morisot’s brand of Impressionism. She makes the case that just as outsourcing breast-feeding to an urban professional freed mothers from their traditional role, Impressionism freed artists from the constrictions of realism.

Morisot had a pretty good career, but Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) had a great one. While studying in Paris between 1865 and 1870, Cassatt was praised for her “virile” style of painting. Griselda Pollock—the director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis at Leeds University—writes that “Cassatt can be aligned with the equally intellectual and art historically aware Degas, that modernizing Ingriste, and beyond the group with Manet.” In other words, for all the tender mommy stuff, Cassatt falls on the masculine side of Impressionism, where precisely delineated composition and discernible mastery of academic drawing count for as much, if not more, than color and atmosphere—Impressionism’s more feminine attributes. Pollock explains Cassatt’s pairing of womanly subjects with a macho Impressionism through a Freudian reading. All the baby hugging that occurs in Cassatt’s compositions, she says, reminds us that “sexuality is not innate but is aroused in infancy.” And because this sexual arousal occurs at such an immature stage of life, Cassatt’s seemingly feminine subject matter is actually more gender-neutral, thus jibing with her masculine variety of Impressionism.

The two other featured artists, Eva Gonzalès (1847–1883) and Marie Bracquemond (1840–1916), aren’t nearly as well known as Morisot and Cassatt. To be honest, they aren’t as good either, although Gonzalès’s A Loge in the Théâtre des Italiens, 1874, is right up there with the best paintings by her teacher, Manet. Both she and Bracquemond paid dearly for their domestic lives: Gonzalès died in her mid-30s of a postpartum embolism, and Bracquemond, who, Pfeiffer tells us, began her career “as one of Ingres’s most promising students,” eventually gave up painting “for the sake of family harmony.” That last phrase is code for succumbing to pressure from her painter-husband, Félix.

If Women Impressionists has a fault, it’s the tendency of the contributing art historians to attribute some of the drier qualities of their own profession to their subjects. Morisot, Cassatt, Gonzalès and Bracquemond would probably be surprised to learn that they were carrying out artistic “projects” in their “chosen field of artistic research.” Pollock contributes a groaner or two: “Cassatt was not a mother herself, but a daughter.” She redeems herself, though, with a witty riff on the “All art aspires to the condition of music” pronouncement of Walter Pater. “In the hands of Cassatt and Degas,” she writes, “painting aspired to the condition of pastel.”

Given the prevailing condition of women in the age of Impressionism, there’s a telling postscript to Morisot’s story. During preparations for her posthumous retrospective, Monet, Degas and Renoir are reported to have argued vociferously over who should play what part in the show. Even after her death, Morisot’s male contemporaries were clamoring to take all the credit. Men!

"Painting Ladies" originally appeared in the June 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's June 2008 Table of Contents.