Claude Monet, in his "La Japonaise" and Jean Baptiste Greuze, in his "Young Woman in a White Hat", chose to create works that are, at their core, fundamentally similar to each other. Each selected - as have so many artists before and after them - to depict a beautiful young woman, a female figure that in many ways encapsulated the ideals of feminine beauty of the subjects' and the artists' generations. However, despite this similarity of subject, the two paintings initially strike us as far more dissimilar than similar to each other. This dissimilarity arises in some measure from changes that occurred between Greuze's facial portrait of his white-bonneted subject in 1780 and Monet's 1875 full-length portrait of a woman dancing with herself. It arises at least as much from the changes that occurred in art historical sensibility and philosophy during these same years. This paper examines both the eras in which these paintings were created and the changes that transpired between the two and argues that the two sets of changes (in ideal feminine beauty and in ideal painting style) should not be regarded as distinct from each other but should rather be seen as part of the overall social and cultural changes that transpired in France and the world during the century under discussion. The two painters, in seeking to create a portrait of a beautiful young woman, call on both the height of painting technique at their disposal as well as the cultural norms for female beauty.
Greuze's "Young Woman in a White Hat" is a relatively small work, only two feet by a foot and a half. The work, as is typical of the artist and the era (as well as is generally true of smaller paintings in general) is finely wrought. The subject of this portrait appears almost as if she had been trapped in the painting, as if she were somehow preserved under glass. The work does not have the photorealism that would characterize some works in the 20th century (perhaps beca...