Risking the Incoherence of Identity: Locating Gender in the Late 19th-Century Artist's Home Studio

This dissertation analyzes late nineteenth-century paintings of the artist's home-based studio in order to gain a better understanding of the way artists perceived and represented both their artmaking and their place in society in terms of gender. The first part of this study discusses the most common gender tropes of the time, including the popular conception that bourgeois private spaces were gendered feminine and public spaces were gendered masculine. This seemingly bipolar world is complicated when one considers the home-based painting studio that is both a professional workspace and a domestic room, thus simultaneously inhabiting both of the gendered worlds typically discussed as separate. According to normative constructs, a man works outside the home and a woman manages that home in a way that both provides the husband with a comforting haven and visibly represents his success in the business world. The artist's studio is a place where we can challenge these assumptions because the space exists outside of the standard dichotomies and because the artist, whether male or female, generally melded the worlds of work and home at some point in a way that few other bourgeois people did at this time. New questions are raised: what does it mean for a male artist to have a "feminine" parlor for a workspace? What does it mean for a woman to earn her living as a professional artist and fulfill her duties as a bourgeois housewife from the same room? This dissertation considers those questions by focusing on studio paintings by William Merritt Chase and Mary Fairchild MacMonnies Low. I argue that in both cases these representations reveal something that is fundamentally at odds with the standard interpretations of such images, the artists who painted them, and our concept of the manner in which gender functioned in the lives of nineteenth-century artists.