The Painted Face: Portraits of Women in France 1814-1914

New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2007. Hardbound. VG/VG As new. Maroon cloth with gold lettering; black dj with color illustration and white lettering; 276 pp. with 232 color and bw illustrations. Central to the book is the theme of make up, the cosmetic application of paint to the surface of the skin which is analagous to the act of painting itself. The author builds the discussion around individual paintings by Ingres, Manet, Cassatt, Cezanne, Picasso and Matisse, beginning with Ingres's idealized portrait of Madame de Senonnes and ending with Matisse's elegaic last portrait of his wife. "Painted portraits are conventionally thought to present accurate representations of their sitters, whose identity and likeness are captured on canvas. This unique hook demonstrates that portraits as pictures are much more complicated than this. Focusing on the painting of female sitters, The Painted Face deals with the stories and fantasies that inform the viewing of portraits, the historical conventions and social situations that affect their appearance and the dehales and discussions that they have generated over time."--Jacket. Contents as follows: Fictions of femininity in the case of Ingres's portrait of Madame de Senonnes -- Framing femininity in Manet's portrait of Mlle E.G. -- Blank mourning: portraiture and separation -- Touching sexual difference: Madame Cézanne in a red dress -- The portrait in pieces: Cubism's corpus -- The lost subject of portraiture: Matisse's Portrait of 1913.