In her P. A. Christensen Lecture, Professor Belnap looked to the influential women in 19th-century France to explain how disruption can cause social reform.
The French Revolution marked a turning point for political and social reform in France. But immediately following it, a different reformation rocked the world of art—and this time, it focused on women’s rights. During this period, laws that had been enacted to empower and protect women were often ignored or overlooked, so women were forced to take control of their own narratives, and some of them did so through art. These women caused what Professor Heather Belnap (19th-Century French Art and Culture) referred to as “mischief” in museums by creating, critiquing, and collecting art. In Belnap’s P. A. Christensen Lecture held February 20, 2025, she introduced the women in the museums of Napoleonic Europe who worked to change society through art.
Women Entering Male Fields
Belnap explained that during this time period, “women were defined by and beholden to for bodily functionalism.” As a result, many paintings from the time objectify women and depict them as fragile or weak. Hoping to change this stigma, women began taking more central roles in the creation and consumption of art. They did so by making names for themselves as artists, viewers, and critics who brought new perspectives to the art world. Belnap described these women as “individuals engaged in what one contemporary social activist calls ‘making beautiful trouble.’”
She shared numerous examples of women who critiqued classic paintings, including Aspasia Conversing with Socrates and Alcibiades by Nicolas-André Monsiau and Phaedra and Hippolytus by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin. Many of these female critics pointed out the artists’ gender biases in their portrayal of women’s body language, the pieces’ color schemes, and even the subjects’ apparel.
“A survey of women writing art criticism reveals an extraordinary richness and diversity that defies generalizations,” Belnap said. “In writing about art, women illuminated such issues as education and training, mobility within public spaces, class formation, and other subjects germane to the molding of the women’s identities.”
Disruptions for Good
Joséphine Bonaparte—the first wife of Napoleon Bonaparte, who was emperor at the time—was one of these women. She purchased paintings and created art collections that called out Napoleon for his mistreatment of her. Belnap believed Joséphine was “using art to expose the machinations of powerful men to treat women like pawns.” Likewise, the French philosopher Germaine de Staël’s novel, Corinne, became an outward “critique of Napoleon’s immoral art practices that [instead] proposed a new aesthetic model that promoted Christian virtue and empathy,” Belnap noted.
Women like Joséphine Bonaparte and Germaine de Staël actively sought “to not only mold the institutions of the museum and art criticism, but also to use these spaces to fashion the identity of the modern bourgeois woman,” Belnap explained. This objective, however, didn’t come without pushback. Many individuals against this movement attempted to undermine women’s credibility by writing reviews—sometimes even impersonating women—and creating paintings that outwardly rejected the influx of new ideas.
Despite the resistance this movement received, women in 19th-century France didn’t stop fighting for change in their society. “Women were frustrating expectations regarding their engagement with not only art, but with French society,” Belnap concluded. “Theirs is the one chapter in a sizeable tome that records the important, even necessary, cultural work performed by bold women who know the value of stirring up some beautiful trouble.”
Watch Dr. Belnap’s full lecture here.