Identity

Within the long history of Western art, identity was once secured by stable iconographic markers—attributes of saints, dynastic coats of arms, or allegorical emblems that fixed the sitter’s place in a cosmic or social order. By the later nineteenth century, however, the rise of the modern city and bourgeois public life displaced such certainties. Artists increasingly turned to mutable signs—fashion, gesture, the direction of a gaze, the cut of a uniform—to register identities that were social rather than transcendental, contingent rather than essential. In this context, the Impressionists and their contemporaries fashion a new symbolic vocabulary in which clothing, accessories, and bodily comportment encode class position, gendered roles, and modes of spectatorship, while at the same time acknowledging the instability and theatricality of those codes.

Semiotically, these motifs operate less as traditional emblems with fixed meanings than as performative cues embedded in specific social scenes. A bareheaded young woman’s direct gaze, for instance, signifies not generic femininity but a self-consciously modern subject, individuated against a backdrop of fashion norms that usually prescribe covered heads. The intensity of address in such a gaze aligns with the direct gaze of the nude in Manet’s Olympia, where the sitter’s stare dismantles the passive, timeless ideal of the classical Venus and insists on a contemporary, contractual subjectivity. Identity here is enacted through looking and being looked at; the gaze itself becomes a sign that the self is aware of its participation in a market of appearances.

Manet’s Olympia offers a particularly concentrated field of identity symbols. The black ribbon choker encircling the nude’s neck functions as a modern, purchasable accessory rather than a mythic ornament, collapsing sexuality, fashion, and commerce into a single line. It stands in calculated tension with the sitter’s exposed body and her guarding hand, the latter a gesture of refusal and control that renders access “conditional, not freely granted.” These signs of self‑possession are reinforced by the presence of Laure, the Black maid, whose own identity is mediated through service yet signaled by her distinct profile and laboring role. The painting’s economy of identity is thus stratified: ribbons, flowers, and gloves act as markers of bought luxury, while the poses and gazes articulate who sets and who obeys the terms of visibility.

If Olympia stages identity as a charged transaction between viewer and model, A Bar at the Folies‑Bergère displaces that negotiation into a teeming public interior. The barmaid Suzon serves as the human face of urban commerce, “both salesperson and potential commodity,” suspended between the branded bottles before her and the distorted mirror behind. Her expression exemplifies what might be called the backward glance without literal turning: allure coupled with reserve, a persona presented while inner life remains withheld. Her costume—anchored by the black choker and dark jacket that supply an “earthy counterweight” to the glittering commodities—frames her as a grounded, modern figure, yet the mirror’s disjunctive reflection makes her identity unstable, doubled and displaced toward the waiting male customer. The painting thus dramatizes how modern identity is constructed at the intersection of labor, display, and the viewing apparatus itself.

In both Manet canvases, identity signs cluster around the neck and torso: chokers, jackets, and bare skin form a syntax of proximity and distance. Yet these same zones read quite differently in Jeanne (Spring). Here the profile silhouette—“classical poise and autonomy”—renders Jeanne as a self‑contained modern subject whose identity fuses allegory and couture. Her floral‑trimmed bonnet, long glove, and parasol are less accessories of seduction than articulations of seasonal renewal; nevertheless, they signal classed femininity in a recognizably Parisian key. The profile’s firmness, allied with the bonnet’s floral excess, exemplifies a recurrent tension in this period between stable outline and volatile surface: identity appears simultaneously as enduring character and as mutable fashion.

Other Impressionist works in this group elaborate identity through family roles and class-coded leisure rather than through erotic display. In Renoir’s Madame Monet and Her Son, the mother‑and‑child unit functions as a secular Madonna, an emblem of caregiving and continuity, yet the specific garments complicate this archetype. The mother’s white dress is a “radiant field” that registers outdoor light, aligning her with Impressionist modernity, while the boy’s blue sailor suit signals “modern, stylish children’s wear” and a “healthy, active bourgeois childhood.” Identity here is domestic and forward‑looking, anchored in a sartorial vocabulary that proclaims participation in contemporary bourgeois norms. The child’s horizontality across the maternal skirt and his pale‑blue against her modulated white visualize interdependence without erasing difference, suggesting a generational relay within the same social stratum.

Monet’s Poppies extends this logic into the open landscape by repeating a mother‑and‑child pair along the slope. This doubling produces a “visual time‑lapse”: the figures appear at once as individuals and as types, less portrait persons than tokens of ongoing familial life threaded through place. The woman’s white dress catching color again acts as a receptive screen; the child’s smaller form, topped by the woman’s parasol, anchors human scale in the expanse of the field. Identity is here distributed across repetition and motion rather than fixed in a single, hieratic pose, underscoring how Impressionism rethinks personhood as something glimpsed, re‑glimpsed, and temporally modulated.

In Berthe Morisot’s Summer’s Day, identity is negotiated within the etiquette of public leisure. Gloves and fashionable hats articulate “respectability and public composure,” enclosing the women in a shell of propriety even as they inhabit a liminal, floating space in the Bois de Boulogne. Their coordinated but not identical costumes, tied together chromatically by the green parasol, indicate shared class position yet allow for subtle differentiation of persona: one leans out, the other faces front, so that identity reads as a relation of postures as much as a matter of dress. Unlike the overtly transactional gazes in Manet, Morisot’s women are not primarily objects of the viewer’s desire; their gloved hands and averted or neutral looks suggest an internal social world, a female companionship that only partially admits spectatorship.

Mary Cassatt’s The Boating Party radicalizes this interiorization of identity within public space. The mother and child form a compact, encircling unit—“protection, trust, and mutual attention”—partially set apart from the massive rower who propels the craft. Gender and class are again coded through clothing: the woman’s dress and hat situate her within the bourgeois leisure sphere, while the child’s small body and pale garments articulate vulnerability and dependence. Yet the decisive identity sign is spatial: the mother’s body and arms form a barrier and a cradle at once, a visual ligature that asserts maternal agency amid male-powered motion. Here, as in Morisot, modern female identity emerges less as spectacle than as an active, relational stance.

Taken together, these works chart a transformation in the iconography of identity from fixed, externally conferred attributes to mutable, situational codes. The same accessory—a choker, glove, parasol—can signal different things depending on its bearer and setting: erotic modernity in Olympia, anchored selfhood and urban fatigue in A Bar at the Folies‑Bergère, seasonal allegory in Jeanne (Spring), or respectable leisure in Morisot and Cassatt. Gaze and pose likewise oscillate between confrontation (the nude’s direct stare), guardedness (Suzon’s fatigued averted eyes), and autonomous absorption (Jeanne’s profile), mapping a spectrum of possibilities for self‑presentation in the modern world. Across these canvases, identity is no longer a given essence but a field of negotiation among fashion, labor, gender, and the act of looking itself—a shift that would underpin later modernist and contemporary explorations of the self as constructed, performative, and historically contingent.