Identity

Within Western art, identity has long been mediated through attributes: crowns and miters, armor and instruments, coats of arms and genealogical emblems. By the nineteenth century, however, this inherited iconographic repertoire is progressively displaced by a more provisional, secular code of clothing, gesture, and setting. In modern painting, the self is no longer guaranteed by lineage or stable role; it is staged, negotiated, and often fractured in public. The symbols in this category—gloves and chokers, interlaced hands and backward glances, uniforms and masks—operate as semiotic markers of such constructed personae. They do not merely describe individuals; they dramatize identity as something performed under the conditions of commodity culture, surveillance, and urban sociability.

Semiotically, these motifs function less as fixed emblems than as indices of social scripts. A black ribbon choker, for instance, has no inherent meaning outside its historical context; yet in Manet’s Olympia (1863), it condenses the painting’s challenge to both classical nudity and bourgeois propriety. The choker encircles the model’s neck with a sharp, modern line, linking her to the world of purchasable fashion and contemporary sexuality rather than timeless myth. It sits amid other identity-markers—the orchid in her hair, the bracelet, the silk slippers and shawl—that read as commodities, while her direct gaze and guarded hand insist on agency. Identity here is a contract between appearance and power: the accessories brand her as a courtesan within Parisian visual culture even as her stare reverses the direction of objectification. The symbol thus operates on two registers, signaling a classed and sexual role while exposing that role as performed.

Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) radicalizes this dynamic by multiplying the axes of looking. The barmaid Suzon stands as the “human face of urban commerce”—a living mediator between viewer and marketplace—framed by branded bottles and a brimming bowl of oranges that code her simultaneously as vendor and potential commodity. Her mask-like, cool face with direct gaze reads as a studied, professional surface: sociability without confession. Yet the mirror behind her scrambles identity through a disjunctive reflection. The man who addresses her appears only in the mirror; her reflected body shifts to the right, her expression altered. The barmaid’s persona is thus doubled and destabilized: frontally, she presents the impassive, serviceable self required by the establishment; in reflection, she is absorbed into the circuitry of desire, exchange, and male address. All-seeing eyes are not depicted literally, but the entire back wall functions as an ocular field, a surface of surveillance in which every subject is both watcher and watched. The work becomes a treatise on how modern identities are constructed in and through reflective surfaces—glass, labels, the painter’s own pictorial mirror.

In Renoir’s figure paintings of the 1880s, identity is organized more directly around touch and relational gesture than around institutional settings. Dance at Bougival (1883) anchors the couple in their interlaced, ungloved hands, a motif of public intimacy and mutual consent. The woman’s flushed face and absorbed, slightly downcast gaze suggest the inwardness of feeling, while the man’s enclosing blue jacket and the swirl of her scarlet-topped bonnet define a vortex of shared presence set against the looser crowd. Their identities, though generically coded as working- or lower-middle-class leisure types, are less individuated than relational: they are the dancing pair, a modern couple temporarily constituted through rhythm and clasped hands. The fallen bouquet and scattered cigarette butts on the ground hint at the ephemerality of this moment; identity here is a transient configuration of desire and circumstance rather than a fixed social role.

By contrast, Dance in the City (also 1883) presents identity as an effect of decorum and hierarchy. The man’s black tailcoat, a symbol of masculine formality and restraint, encloses the woman’s luminous white satin gown, which carries connotations of respectability and feminine display. Her opera-length gloves are not mere descriptions of attire; they are social instruments that regulate and authorize touch. As her gloved hand rests with calculated pressure on his shoulder, intimacy becomes legible only because etiquette sanctions it. Both faces are partially withheld; the painting relocates identity from psychology to costume and posture. Renoir thus stages a double identity: the pair as refined participants in urban high society, and the woman as a subject whose inward life is delicately veiled by the very codes that permit her visibility.

Renoir’s In the Garden (1885) further complicates this relational paradigm. At a café table under an arbor, a young man leans in, his fingers folding over the woman’s hand; she meets the viewer with a calm, front-facing gaze, shoulders squared, forearm braced along the red table. The lightly clasped hands form a tentative bond, yet the table’s diagonal acts as a polite barrier, keeping the gesture provisional. Her floral dress and hat feather suggest fashioned femininity and modest decorum; his parted lips and incline signal petition. Here, identity is triangulated between self-presentation to the partner, to the viewer, and to the codes of courtship. The woman’s direct, composed gaze interrupts the fantasy of her being wholly defined by the man’s desire: she is not only an object of courtship but an observing subject who addresses us as well. The symbol of the clasped hands, then, does not simply affirm union; it stages negotiation, making visible the work of consent and reserve that underwrites modern romantic identities.

Across these works, certain symbols recur and shift meaning as they migrate between contexts. Gloves, for instance, index public self-containment in Manet’s Jeanne (Spring) (1881), where the long camel glove and floral bonnet turn the sitter into an allegorical yet utterly contemporary embodiment of seasonal renewal. Her profile, sharp against luminous foliage, fuses classical ideals of beauty with the latest couture, signaling identity as an elegant synthesis of tradition and fashion. In Renoir’s ballroom scene, gloves manage sanctioned intimacy; in Manet’s bar and brothel interiors, their absence or presence shades distinctions between labor, leisure, and sexual transaction. Similarly, direct versus averted gazes function as a syntax of interiority and social address: Olympia’s frontal stare weaponizes self-consciousness; Suzon’s cool, masklike gaze registers professional detachment; Renoir’s downcast or sideways glances signal feeling folded back into the self even within public space.

Over the later nineteenth century, these identity symbols evolve from relatively stable markers of class and propriety into instruments for questioning the coherence of the self. Manet’s strategic use of chokers, jewelry, and commodities underscores the manufactured nature of feminine personae under capitalist spectacle, while his fractured mirrors and confrontational frontality expose the tensions between image and subject. Renoir, less polemical, explores how identities are formed in the interstices of touch, etiquette, and environment: interlaced hands, floral dresses, and hats become means of visualizing the fragile negotiations that give modern relationships their shape. In each case, the iconography of identity shifts from heraldic certainty to performative ambivalence, signaling a broader modern recognition that who one “is” in painting depends on how—and by whom—one is seen.