Reframing Allegory in Work by American Women Painters in the Gilded Age: Six Case Studies (Routledge Research in Gender and Art)

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 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 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 forg