NCSA Conference, Urbanism and Urbanity
Chicago, IL – March 19-22, 2014
Urban Leisure Pursuits
Friday, March 21
SESSION VI, 2:15–3:30 PM
Making a Modern Amazone: The Equestrienne as Urban Actor and French Fashion Icon
Justine De Young, Harvard University
While the elegant horsewoman in Victorian England has been perceptively investigated by Janet Arnold and Alison Matthews David, the amazone as an icon of modern French fashionability and femininity and character of urban life has gone thus far largely unexamined. Women had appeared as equestriennes in painting before the nineteenth century, but virtually exclusively in royal or aristocratic portraiture. Under the Second Empire, however, for the first time, riding became a fashionable, bourgeois, even urban activity in Paris; women could rent horses in the new Bois de Boulogne for a morning or an afternoon ride. In the 1860s and 70s, the amazone began to figure repeatedly in modern-life paintings and sculptures at the annual Paris Salon. Parallel to its rise in popularity with the bourgeoisie, riding and riding dress began to feature regularly in women’s fashion magazines and in the illustrated press.
This paper proposes to examine Renoir’s The Morning Ride, exhibited at the 1873 Salon des Refusés, alongside Carolus-Duran’s Au bord de la mer , accepted at 1873 Salon, both of which assumed the monumental scale of history painting for their bourgeois riding subjects. Both works attracted the notice of critics and caricaturists; indeed their similar subjects, but different settings invited comparison. This paper will examine the reaction to these two equestrian works for what it can tell us about the amazone as a new figure of urban life and about discourses of the time surrounding women and the new urban spaces of Paris.