Reframing Allegory in Work by American Women Painters of the Gilded Age

Addressing paintings depicting idealized and allegorical female figures, this book presents a series of six case studies of US women artists.

Lisa N. Peters posits that the indirectness and subterfuge used in this type of work afforded nineteenth-century US women a means of self-expression and self-reflection, not otherwise easily available. The six case studies cover the artists Lilly Martin Spencer, Ella Ferris Pell, Mary Lizzie Macomber, Edith Mitchill Prellwitz, Louise Howland King Cox, and Ella Condie Lamb. The artists used allegory’s symbolic value for messages of female agency, intellect, self-sufficiency, and empathy, and through this appropriated and subverted a long artistic tradition. The case studies reveal that these women artists also used their work to suggest the complexities and identity issues they faced at the turn of the twentieth century, at a point when progress for women in society and the workforce was going through huge changes. Revealing a body of overlooked and often forgotten works, the book not only fills a gap in art-historical considerations of the era but also reveals a female perspective that counterbalances that of the male artists whose work has thus far dominated the canon.

This book is ideal for scholars and students in art history, gender studies, American studies, and history.