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theses

The Early Impressionist painter Frédéric Bazille, who moved frequently between Paris and his hometown of Montpellier, attended medical school for four years before deciding to paint full-time. Yet scholarship on Impressionism neglects these facts, thereby resisting the relevance of his medical training or provincial upbringing to his paintings. My dissertation instead embraces Bazille’s dual training and double geographies to illuminate the contradictions that riddled notions of masculinity during the French Second Empire. I contend that Bazille’s awkwardly posed and ambiguously structured bodies do not simply represent an immature phase of Impressionism that ended with his premature death in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, but that they instead thematize contemporary anxieties about intimacy and vulnerability in social conduct. Bazille’s attempts to order his knowledge of corporeal structures and processes essentially required him to grapple with the problem of knowing too much. Chapter One argues that Bazille’s medical training shaped his paintings of male nudes in natural settings, as the Montpellier school’s Vitalist doctrine theorized the body as a holistic system that demanded both internal and external harmony. Chapter Two posits that Bazille’s struggles to merge medicine and art into holistic painted bodies backfired, leading him to fixate in his portraits on clothing details that emphasized the separation between the structures of bodies and the clothes that overlay them. Chapter Three examines how Bazille’s portraits of his Impressionist friends and their portraits of him present intimate homosocial dynamics that compel a reconsideration of Impressionism’s origin story. Finally, Chapter Four actively redresses Impressionist scholarship’s geographical bias by situating Bazille’s vision of his Southern home, articulated through his images of soldiering and laboring bodies, against the increasingly vulnerable Second Empire.  

ETD_6251

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Mary Manning

doi:10.7282/T3125VJH

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.