List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter One: Painting the Traffic in Women
Chapter Two: In the Brothel
Chapter Three: Testing the Limits
The Menace of Fashion
The Invasion of the Boulevard
Chapter Four: Suspicious Professions
Working Women for Sale?
Mutual Desire in the New Nightspots
Notes
Bibliography
Index

“[T]he only serious study of the visual representation of prostitution during the impressionist era. An excellent and important work.” —Linda Nochlin, Lilla Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

"As prostitution escalated in 19th-century Paris, it likewise appeared more frequently as a subject in French literature and art. Clayson (art history, Northwestern) reasons that there is a "connection between, on the one hand, covert prostitution as subject matter and, on the other, evasiveness as narrational strategy among artists who operated within Impressionist circles during the 1870s and 1880s." Her unique, often complex, study analyzes the male artists' "contradictory dialectic of disgust and fascination" toward their female subjects. Clayson claims that their "ambiguous depictions served to reinforce" lowly female stereotypes. Amusing caricatures, extensive documentation, and good reproductions of Cezanne's Olympia series, Degas's monotypes of brothel scenes, and Manet's Nana support Clayson's feminist perceptions, adding new meaning to rather familiar artworks. Recommended for large art history and women's study collections".
-Joan Levin, MLS, Chicago

Hollis Clayson is professor of art history at Northwestern University.