The history of breastfeeding reveals uncomfortable truths about women, jobs and money. An unlikely place where the history of nursing is clearly visible is in Impressionist paintings.
The art of Manet and his followers is best known for sunny landscapes and scenes of Parisian leisure, but many of these paintings tell complex human stories. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas and Berthe Morisot portray breastfeeding as a perfect example of women’s invisible labor.
Infant care is an age-old practice, but the industry was booming in 19th-century Paris as more women worked in Georges Eugène Haussmann’s newly designed modern city. Rural nannies (ideally in their twenties, with healthy, strong teeth and dense white milk) are routinely employed to nurse the children of both urban lower and middle class women. Employed on a regular basis, he was one of the most valuable domestic servants of the bourgeoisie.
But following scientific discoveries by French chemist Louis Pasteur about how bacteria spread, and medical publications touting the health benefits of breast milk, maternal nursing became preferred over breastfeeding. Also, conservative Catholicism and liberal political ideologies fused together to promote breastfeeding as central to the modern woman.
Breastfeeding was not a common Impressionist theme, but Degas, Renoir, and Morisot’s treatment of breastfeeding offers an interesting insight into how women who practiced it were perceived.
At a Country Race (1869) by Edgar Degas
The Country Racecourse (1869) depicts a wealthy family in a luxurious carriage, a picture of modern success. The mother and nanny (identified by her costume and exposed breasts) are seated together, while the well-dressed father and bulldog (an image of modern domestic life) are both looking directly at the baby and breasts. There is
A painting by Edgar Degas focuses on a wealthy French nanny. credit: From Wikimedia Commons
Here Degas emphasizes that through the convergence of themes of the male gaze, the working woman’s body, and urban leisure, even in paintings that take up leisure as an ostensible focus, it can be exchanged with contemporary capitalism. is pervasive.
“Maternity” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1885)
The transition to maternal nursing can be seen in Renoir’s 1880s series of works in which his future wife, Aline, nurses his eldest son, Pierre. Aline was a seamstress from the countryside, so it wasn’t too shocking for a devoted bourgeois audience to see her breastfeeding.
In the first work of this series called “Maternity”, Renoir shows Aline sitting on a fallen tree. She looks like a ruddy-faced peasant in a straw hat and dowdy clothes. She is also sexualized through her plump, jutting breasts and direct gaze.
Auguste Renoir’s “Maternity” (Madame Renoir with her son Pierre, also known as “The Breastfeeding Child”) sees a move away from infant feeding. credit: From Wikimedia Commons
Like Pierre, Aline looks blissful, but something is wrong. It is awkward for Renoir to connect her breastfeeding spouse with the natural world. This portrayal is attributed to feminist Simone de Beauvoir in her “Second Sex”, under patriarchy, through the ability of women to breastfeed and become mothers: “Women are nothing more than domesticated females.” ” reflects the claim. Her calm personality also suggests that breastfeeding isn’t a burden or a “work.”
Berthe Morisot, Angel’s Nanny Breastfeeding Julie Manet (1880)
The relationship between art, work and money is most evident in Berthe Morisot’s small painting Angèle Feeding Julie Manet (1880).
Painted in dazzling shades of white, pink, and green, it reveals a mingled figure of Morisot’s baby and the woman hired to nurse her at home. The situation itself is radical. A female artist rather than a male artist depicts a woman breastfeeding a child, not out of parenting instinct but for money. But what makes it so appealing is the way the painting is done.
Berthe Morisot’s striking painting depicts another woman breastfeeding her child. credit: From Wikimedia Commons
It is not the bare chest that shocks the viewer, but the intensity of the brushstrokes that cover the unfinished canvas, blending flesh, figures, dress, and background, with thick, uneven strokes in different directions. will fire. There is something very expressive about this painting that perhaps only mothers can feel.
Morisot exhibited more works than any other Impressionist painter. Dependent on her mother and her step-in-law Manetsu, selling her art was her only chance to have any kind of financial freedom. It could have been possible. Thankfully, in the case of contemporary art, she had both.