Greg M. Thomas’s comprehensive Impressionist Children: Childhood, Family, and Modern Identity in French Art intelligently expands upon ground recently covered by others in scholarly literature: images of French nineteenth-century childhood. The finest parts of the book are his discussions of works by Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt, about which he unearths new factual detail, and provides persuasive original readings of paintings both familiar and not. Drawing upon a wide socio-historical framework, Thomas analyzes images from the world of commodities associated with childhood, especially toys. His overarching thesis, that Impressionist images of childhood reveal the fundamental dilemma of the modern subject—“trying to be a free individual in a conforming, commodifying social world” (191)—is convincing. Structurally the book is pleasing: within each chapter are subdivisions that define the discussions. Images—black and white, and color—are carefully chosen. The tone is well judged: it is scholarly but accessible to non-specialists. An omission—perhaps because of an editorial diktat—is the original French quotations.

The introduction lays out the terrain, beginning with the truisms of cutting-edge Childhood Studies, such as the observation that “childhood exists only in relation to the adults who imagine it.” It also rehearses the findings of recent writing on French nineteenth-century images of childhood, such as the notion that “the Impressionists forged a new visual model of childhood . . . a new, distinctly modern notion of children as autonomous individuals.” Thomas’s own contributions to these debates are outlined here: Impressionist paintings of childhood articulate “a distinctly modern awareness of fundamental disjunction between one’s private, interior consciousness and one’s public, exterior image” alongside another pressure—“individuality . . . constrained by capitalist commodification.” Pursued compellingly throughout is the contention that Impressionism “actively thematized the reproduction of identity, using art to visualise the social and cultural modes of acculturation through which children are shaped into social beings” (ix–x).

Woven into an overview of the socio-cultural history of the period as it concerns childhood is a deft discussion on identity and subjectivity, which in turn helps frame many of the debates in the book. Disappointingly, this discussion does not, ultimately, reach its logical conclusion: it is the complexities of modernism—facture as well as matter—and not merely modernity which cause identity to collapse in upon subjectivity (see chapter 5).

Chapter 1, “A Model Child: Pictorial Traditions in the Nineteenth Century,” is a helpful review of the imagery, from the Renaissance onwards, that would have been available to the Impressionists. Thomas capably links these images to the paradigms of child rearing with which they co-existed. Like any quick survey, this book suffers in places from overgeneralization. There is a one-sided description of “the eighteenth-century age of innocence” (23), which excludes (for starters) François Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and ignores work by Carol Duncan, among others, on the overt acceptance of childhood sexuality in the period.

Chapter 2, “All Dolled Up,” is particularly impressive for its comparative imagery from popular culture, and its use of socio-historical data. These support the overall claim of the book, all the more persuasive here, that Impressionist paintings of childhood stage a tension “between individuals’ assertion of autonomous subjectivity and a consumer culture pressuring individuals to conform to stereotyped representations of that autonomy” (33). Thomas’s research on dolls and the rigorous exploration of how dolls permeate popular and then Impressionist imagery, especially by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Morisot, is a tour de force. The contrasts and comparisons between the two are finely drawn: “Morisot presented [dolls] not as visual models but as relational models, reflecting her own experience mothering Julie” (63). There is some marvelously exact historical research on contemporary toys such as a discussion of the comparative prices of tricycles like the one shown in Claude Monet’s Jean Monet on His Mechanical Horse (1872).

Chapter 3, “Home and Garden,” “takes up the challenge of Griselda Pollock’s argument” in her “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity” vis-à-vis the actual and pictured spaces of female Impressionists’ paintings (Griselda Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” in Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art, London: Routledge, 1988, 50–90). Much discussed since its inception, the flaws and strengths of Pollock’s argument are subtly developed here, carefully contrasting, in turn, “Cassatt’s more objective, voyeuristic treatment of children and women from Morisot’s more subjective, self-expressive description of her own interior experience as a mother” (73–74). As well as such fine distinctions between the two (considerably less successfully with Monet), there is balanced consideration of the vexed question of Cassatt’s feminism—or not. Thomas steers a scrupulously gradated path here, asserting that Cassatt “systematically explored the dynamic interaction of private and public space in the production and reproduction of feminine identity. Her women consume culture outside and cultivate new citizens inside” (89). Similar care is taken with Morisot and her “acculturation of Julie” (98).

Chapter 4, “A Walk in the Park,” explores “the public display of . . . familial intimacy” (125). Unfortunately, Thomas does not fully acknowledge published work on this subject (a persistent problem in the book). He begins what will be a drawn out contradiction in his use of psychoanalysis and biography, regarding how far one may read Monet’s familial tensions and character into his work. While earlier he had refused such readings (“psychological inferences are precarious” (117)), now they are allowed (“Monet’s own family interest may have spurred this” (141)). There are, however, more thoughtful observations on Morisot and Cassatt, whose “park pictures generate an air of feminine freedom, visualising women’s power to extend their acculturating influence from the family into the public order” (152).

Chapter 5, “Family Reunion,” is the most problematic. In it, Thomas extrapolates from individual childhoods to the family, “the master relationship in Impressionist child imagery” (157), and tantalizingly develops a theme heralded early on: how “Impressionism’s engagement with” “religion, politics, and patriarchy,” all important in previous and contemporary “high art” such as Academic painting, is, by contrast, “more controversial, and . . . complex” (158). Implicitly, it seems, we are to understand this is due to the Impressionists’ inability to reconcile ideals of personal freedom with the constraints of the commodifying world “out there,” but this idea needs considerably more teasing out. What of the well-established scholarly line on Manet’s “detachment as opposition” (John House, “Manet’s Maximilian: History Painting, Censorship and Ambiguity,” in Juliet Wilson-Bareau, ed., Manet, The Execution of Maximilian: Paintings, Politics and Censorship, London: National Gallery Publications, 1992, 106); on Camille Pissarro’s anarchism; or Monet’s oppressive patriarchy? Pierre Macherey’s “what is important in the work is what it does not say” (Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall, London: Routledge, 1978, 87) would have served better here than Thomas’s avoidance of a discussion of the root cause of these omissions.

There are also limited readings of Monet. Thomas’s summary characterization of the two versions of The Luncheon (1865–66) is “how placidly Monet implanted these family tensions” (180) into a “much rosier interpretation of modern family life” (181). He goes on to discount similar palpable disjunctions in Renoir. While La Promenade (1870) is allowed to come “close to self-conscious flirtation” (24), there are far more overt examples of discomfiting sexuality which Thomas ignores, such as Nude Boy with a Cat (1868), or Acrobats at the Cirque Fernando (1879), or Gypsy Girl (1879). Indeed, in Thomas’s view, “The Impressionists never sexualized” (24). One is led to wonder how to ignore this strand in, say, Edgar Degas’s Young Spartans (1860–61), or Frédéric Bazille’s Young Boy on the Grass (1870), or Morisot’s Psyche (1876). Indeed, it is here that the real omission from Thomas’s impressive panoply of framing discourses (from consumer goods, to manuals of child rearing, to Salon reviews, and more) is sorely felt. All but ignored in the book, contemporary novels would have provided a salutary check to his optimism—specifically in the case of certain paintings: the sources in Émile Zola for Renoir’s Swing (1876) and Riding in the Bois de Boulogne (1873), for instance. And what of Charles Baudelaire’s citation of Eugène Delacroix: “when I was a child I was a little monster” (Charles Baudelaire, “The Life and Work of Eugène Delacroix,” in Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P. E. Charvet, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972 (1863), 386; emphasis in original) or Gustave Flaubert’s acerbic observations on childhood corruption in the Dictionary of Received Ideas? Stronger parts of this chapter include particularly perceptive work on Degas’s focus “on the place of the family in men’s public identities” (167) and sustained analyses of Cassatt.

Overoptimism, tellingly, informs the final sentence of the book’s epilogue (which, understandably, briefly extends childhood into adolescence). Here Thomas undoes many of his careful extrapolations of the previous two hundred pages: “One reason modern viewers still return to Impressionism as a compelling vision of what childhood might mean is that it captured a brief, pivotal moment in the history of Western childhood, when the individual creation of subjectivity in a world of pervasive social pressure could appear still to be a self-constructive process full of pleasure” (201). Thomas is, of course, entitled to this view, but there should be much more overt acknowledgement of its confutations. “The ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent” (Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne, Oxford: Phaidon, 1964 (1863), 13) is as poignantly mournful as triumphant for its brevity. Bravado and blaguing—of facture or matter—may be darkly, negative, as the Goncourts, those “Impressionist” writers, insisted in their summary of their era and its paintings: “that terrible laugh, enraged, feverous, evil, almost devilish, of spoilt children rotten from the ancestors of their civilisation” (Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Manette Saloman, 2d ed., Paris, 1868, 163; my translation).