ABSTRACT
The conscious construction of the look of a woman, the rapid changes in fashion, underscored the sense of the ‘presentness’ of the present. The depth of the painter's engagement with this world was the point at issue. In the writing about art in the late nineteenth century, the sense of the social integration of painting with the world of fashion, manners and aesthetic refinement was most frequently observed in the English country house and the apartments of the fashionable faubourgs. Even today historians are apt to apologize for seeming to glory in works which otherwise they might regard as politically incorrect – men painting women, female beauty, the dominant male gaze – fashion, flattery and fiduciary values all tied up together in something which might be morally indefensible. The white bourgeois male historian is faced with acute problems in confronting an age in which class and gender relations were very different from those of today.
