ABSTRACT
When women's albums or amateur paintings have been noticed, they have been condescended to as, at best, quaint illustrations of charming trivialities or, at worst, evidence of women's pictorial incompetency. This chapter considers the subject from both within and without. It describes the forms of visual expression practiced by middle-and upper-class women in nineteenth-century Europe, and then suggests what role these images may have played in definitions of femininity. The chapter highlights the inability of feminine imagery to assert itself outside a domestic world, and explains that inability by defining the differences between feminine imagery and painting. It explores how the characteristics of feminine imagery have worked against its recognition. Feminine imagery shows that throughout the century radically different kinds of visual representation did coexist, each with its own economy of creation and exchange. The women who made these albums and amateur paintings made pictures as integral parts of family life and emotional bonds.
