An 1870 satirical cartoon from the journal Paris-Caprice depicts an artist, palette in hand, painting directly onto his female subject’s skin. Conflating the two meanings of “painting a face,” the artist eliminates the need for a canvas. Tamar Garb finds this spoof central to understanding the complex intersection of social, psychological, and symbolic factors involved in painted portraits. In The Painted Face: Portraits of Women in France, 1814–1914, she suggests that the metaphorical relationship between applying makeup to a face and paint to canvas provides a useful key to analyzing the superficiality and artifice found in oil paintings of women. Though discussions of makeup play a larger role in the prologue, throughout her text Garb emphasizes the importance of surface effects to understanding not only pictures of women, but femininity itself. Analyzing artists ranging from Ingres to Matisse, Garb proposes that the increasing emphasis on materiality and self-referential painting techniques in later nineteenth-century portraiture paralleled a decline in the importance to the genre of both representation and identity. Portraits of female subjects were particularly conducive to this shift. Because they typically lacked individualization, flattering the subject rather than providing an unvarnished record of her appearance, images of women were malleable and could more easily accommodate stylistic experimentation.

The nineteenth century witnessed drastic changes in the definition and function of portraiture, with artists constantly challenging the genre’s conventions. Early in the twentieth century, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, and Expressionism visibly undermined the representative strategy of portraiture, with splashes of color that leaked onto the skin or with abstracted, even fragmented, constructs of the body that broke down form altogether. Interestingly, as Garb reveals, earlier descriptive techniques such as Realism had already threatened to destabilize the delicate standards of female portrayal, as an attempt to articulate truth conflicted with the idealization that had characterized portraits of women for centuries. In six chapters, Garb sets out to study the results of these changes, rather than outlining a history of the portrait. Each chapter stands as an independent essay, employing a single painting as an entry point into the ideology and reception of portraiture at a particular moment in time.

She begins with Ingres’s 1814 portrait Madame de Senonnes, a voluptuous figure swathed in red velvet and lace and seated on pillowy gold cushions. Madame de Senonnes inspired a great deal of subjective fantasizing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, until the subject’s “real” identity was revealed by a persevering art historian in 1931 (Alfred Gernoux, Madame de Senonnes, Châteaubriant: Imprimerie Lemarre, 1931, 97–9; cited in Garb, 28). Garb’s account of these speculative narratives provides a fascinating and at times humorous reminder of the ways in which viewers interpret and relate to portraits of women. Her discussion of Ingres’s painting technique—his “invisible touch” (22) and his creation of an illusionism that aims to erase the separation between viewer and subject—provides a counterpoint to her discussion of other paintings in later chapters.

In her second chapter, Garb leaps forward over half a century, concentrating on Manet’s Portrait of Mlle E.G. [Eva Gonzalès] from 1870. To substantiate her claim in the prologue that this is not a comprehensive or evolutionary history of portraiture (though the book is organized chronologically), Garb gives short shrift to works painted in or around the mid-century. While she discusses several such portraits in her section on Manet, including Jean Hippolyte Flandrin’s Madame Louis Antoine de Cambourg (1846) and Gustave Courbet’s portrait of his sister, Juliette Courbet (1846), Garb might usefully have dedicated a chapter to this period of portraiture (she does, however, constructively compare several nineteenth-century paintings to Renaissance masterpieces, pointing out historical precedents or sources for particular themes). The important role of commissions is also absent from her investigation, since, for the most part, she opts to focus on images that depict the artist’s friends or family members.

These choices highlight Garb’s interest in the problematic and often harshly criticized modes of representation that arise at the end of the nineteenth century. In Manet’s portrait of fellow painter Gonzalès at an easel, he employed broad brushstrokes to create a smudged, shadowy effect on the sitter’s bare arms—quite distinct from the technique of Ingres, who used oil paint to impart a porcelain-smooth, unblemished quality to the skin. Contemporary reviewers deemed Manet’s technique an affront to the sitter and saw it as confounding the genre’s gendered code of propriety (59–60). Garb’s inclusion of contemporary criticism and caricatures in this section richly illustrates how portraits functioned as an extension of the woman portrayed. Too generalized, and the painting failed as a portrait; too particular, and the image not only insulted the sitter by revealing her flaws but also suggested that the artist was perhaps too intimately familiar with her person.

Garb’s argument in this chapter revolves around the self-referential quality of Manet’s painterly technique, which emphasizes the identity of the artist as much as that of his sitter. However, the supporting commentary on the critical reception of Portrait of Mlle E.G. usefully conveys the delicate balancing act required to create a well-received portrait in fin-de-siécle France. Carolus-Duran’s Madame Ernest Feydeau (1870) was a success at the Salon, Garb asserts, because of the artist’s ability to negotiate what viewers considered to be a “faithful rendition of its subject” (61) with flattery, glamour, dynamism, and appropriate feminine accoutrements. Manet, in contrast, inspired a caricature in L’Illustration that dubbed viewers of his work the “grotesque Sunday public” (60). Critics considered his representation of Gonzalès an inappropriate paradigm of its genre, just as the artist’s Olympia (1865) had been for the nude five years earlier (59). Garb presents these examples to illuminate the contrasting agendas of society portraiture and Realism, suggesting that only in resolving the two could an artist avoid the “brutality” (62) that contemporary critics associated with Manet’s treatment of the female body.

Garb’s chapter on Mary Cassatt’s unfinished depiction of her elderly mother, circa 1889, pinpoints the transition in French portraiture from presence to absence, both literally and metaphorically. The portrait serves as a fulcrum for examining theoretical ideas about separation and loss. Cassatt created this image after the deaths of the sitter’s husband and daughter (the artist’s father and sister). In comparing the painting to traditional deathbed images, Garb makes a distinction between the condition of melancholy, a perpetual state of grief, and that of mourning, in which loss is excised and released. At times the author may project a bit too far, as when she suggests that the painting is unfinished because Cassatt lacked “the will either to finish or to sign the work” (136). However, her discussion of the subject’s withdrawal in the melancholic mode of portraiture—Mrs. Cassatt’s empty stare and generalized mourning attire diminishing her individual personality—helps to articulate the breaking down of traditional portrait conventions that serves as a leitmotif in the second half of the book.

In her last three chapters, Garb highlights portraits in which the subject’s identity and physical form become increasingly less relevant while the materiality and artifice of the picture surface become more prominent. In a chapter on one of Cézanne’s portraits of his wife, Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress (1893–95), she focuses on the artist’s portrayal of the sitter’s hands, examining both his painterly technique and his interest in the theory of touch. The idea that Cézanne evoked sensory experiences in his paintings is not a new one (and indeed Garb integrates art-historical criticism by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and D. H. Lawrence to support her points), but this argument fits especially well within the book’s larger discussion of how the displacement of identity functioned in tandem with an increasing emphasis on tactility and the tangible experience of painting. Here, arguments rooted in the physical evidence of paintings, such as the relationship between touch and “retinal sensation” (145) in Cézanne’s patchy brushwork, are more convincing than those based on Freudian analysis. Garb’s tenuous hypothesis that Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress relates hermaphroditic concerns (i.e., a penis simulated amid the sketchy flowers on Madame Cézanne’s lap) undermines the compelling visual analysis found elsewhere in this chapter.

Ultimately, Garb demonstrates a surprising continuity in portraiture across her period of concentration. Picasso’s fragmented composition “Ma Jolie” (Woman with a Zither or Guitar) (1911–12) would seem to break with representation altogether, but Garb points out that the painting is nonetheless indebted to traditional portrait conventions in Picasso’s frontal positioning of the subject and inclusion of feminine signifiers such as a semicircular breast, pubic triangle, and even the words “Ma Jolie” (my pretty one). Because portraiture of women had always been particularly susceptible to projections and artistic license, female subjects could easily be restaged, even replaced, yet still remain identifiable. Garb’s adroit inclusion of historical tidbits—such as Picasso’s claim to have changed his lover’s name from Marcelle Humbert to Eva Gouel—underscores her hypothesis that the identities of female sitters, like their nineteenth-century predecessors, remained deeply pliable well into the twentieth century. Throughout much of her analysis, Garb makes clear that viewers’ projections onto the sitter continued to provide an important route to understanding and interpreting a picture, even as artists reduced the physical presence of the subject’s body.

Closing with a discussion of Matisse’s Portrait (1913), a depiction of the artist’s wife in muted blues and grays, Garb brings her focus back to the issue of identity. At the time of its exhibition at the Salon d’Automne, Matisse’s somber rendering of the colorless, mask-like face was deeply disturbing not only to viewers but to the sitter as well. Integrating the stylized features of African and Iberian masks (as Picasso had in his Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)), Matisse created an “anti-portrait” (199) that refuted the specificity of the human face. Garb draws an intriguing comparison between the physical loss of the iconic Mona Lisa after its theft from the Louvre in 1911 and contemporary viewers’ despair over the absence of identity and flattery in portraits of this period. Unlike the accommodating Mona Lisa, whose eyes follow the viewer around a room, Matisse’s blank-eyed subject refuses to engage. By ironically titling his painting Portrait, the author asserts, Matisse alluded to the presence of identity while rejecting its physical incarnation. By the second decade of the twentieth century, portraits, it seemed, “were just pictures” (224), no longer answering to a set of rules distinct from general painting practice.

Garb mentions in passing that photography provided the impetus for these aesthetic changes, though she does not analyze the camera’s effect on painting (a topic that is well covered elsewhere; see, for instance, Heather McPherson, The Modern Portrait in Nineteenth-Century France, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001; John Gage, “Photographic Likeness,” in Joanna Woodall, ed., Portraiture: Facing the Subject, Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1997; and Shearer West, “Portraiture and Modernism,” in her Portraiture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Nor does she explain how or why disparate artistic trends developed over the course of the century. Instead, Garb offers case studies in the shifting functions of painted portraiture. Judiciously combining her discussion of historical facts with close visual analysis, she asserts that femininity was subject to artistic appropriation and manipulation. It might have proved enlightening to include some less-familiar portraits (particularly by female painters, since Cassatt and Morisot are the only practitioners discussed in detail) rather than concentrating solely on well-established masterpieces. One regrets the lack of a general bibliography, particularly since the study of portraiture has attracted much new scholarship in recent years. Visually, however, The Painted Face is appealing, with 70 color and 140 black-and-white illustrations, many full page, including several details of paintings that help the reader to grasp the author’s materials-based focus. The design resembles that of a coffee-table book, and readers lured by the aesthetic appeal of Garb’s glamorous cover girl—a seductive detail of Ingres’s Madame de Senonnes—may be surprised by its academic content. Although the cover image cleverly embodies Garb’s thesis concerning the manipulative power and artifice of portraiture, the choice is somewhat misleading, given that the majority of the book concentrates on later works.

In her acknowledgements, Garb states that in conceiving the book she based her selection of paintings on her own preferences, rather than seeking portraits that “conform to political, intellectual or historical criteria or pre-conceived notions of coverage” (ix). This approach reminds us that portraiture’s ability to resonate deeply with viewers is perhaps its most enduring quality. Indeed, rather than attempting an overarching survey of the subject, Garb is discerning and even personal. At first glance, the concentration of well-studied masterworks suggests that the text covers little new ground; but Garb’s great strength is in her critical eye, and her clever incorporation of history and popular culture make this book quite enjoyable to read. The Painted Face offers numerous valuable insights into a field of art history that, as Garb well demonstrates, remains fraught with complexities.