The female nude - historical skins
The images below are a general collection of paintings of the female nude from created between the 1500s and the 1900s. The images provide a small snap shot of this history, and there are exceptions, but they offer a general idea of how women have been portrayed over the centuries in art.
The art works have been categorised into three area, the standing nude, the seated nude and the reclining nude. As more art works are discovered they are added to the collections, so the resource is always expanding.
Click on each art work to see it full scale and have a look through, think about:
The art works have been categorised into three area, the standing nude, the seated nude and the reclining nude. As more art works are discovered they are added to the collections, so the resource is always expanding.
Click on each art work to see it full scale and have a look through, think about:
- what ideas around the female body are being perpetuated?
- How do they make you feel as you scroll through.
In conversation with the Young Women Artists (YWAs)
Conversations exploring the history of the female nude supported a discussion of various paintings of the female nude and how they made the YWAs feel when they looked at them. The YWAs’ share their reactions to these paintings of women in the following extracts:
The learnt repetition of the female nude
The word ‘normal’ was used by several of the YWAs, acknowledging the learnt repetition of seeing images of nude women in similar positions on such a regular basis that
they had become numb to such exposure.
Bethany: I was kind of like, I didn't feel, I just felt kind of normal, coz I think I'm very used to seeing women portrayed in that way. Like in art and I guess media, but I think seeing a woman, naked or lying on a bed, it's kinda just expected, like it’s not like 'oh my goodness she's naked let me avert my eyes’, it's like ‘oh, she's naked’. I see that all the time, everywhere, it just kinda felt typical.
Lily: Yes, Ermm, I felt as if they were kind of normal, because you see, ermm, nude women quite a lot in art, and I didn't really, I didn't think it was all a bit strange or anything. I just didn't really mind.
Christie: I felt, erm, quite comfortable looking at them, because like, it's all part of life, the drawings are females and it's been going on for centuries and many people have been doing over the past years, ermm, even till this day, so it's like part of our history.
As the positioning of women’s bodies in this colonial narrative has been ‘going on for centuries’, and in consequence is seen as ‘part of our history’, the images were not considered unusual but in fact have become normalised. As Bethany highlights ‘seeing a woman naked is just kinda expected’.
Ideas of beauty
The patriarchal and colonial repetition of these images have become the ‘norm’ of what is deemed beautiful. All the YWAs spoke of the women in the traditional paintings in terms of their attractiveness,
Lily: I thought they were really beautiful.
Bethany: the paintings in the first one they are like really so stunning and the women are so beautiful, I think everyone wants to be, people often aspire to be like that because they want people to look at them and to think wow, she's beautiful.
Lienne: I guess the position looks attractive to the beholder, especially men, to emphasise their curves.
Bethany suggests that images manipulate her way of understanding what is valued. Our understandings of beauty are also imbued with the learnt structures of colonial histories, as discussed in Raced Skins, a learnt process in which women are ranked in terms of race, heterosexual desire, ability and age (Nead: 1992).The hierarchy of beauty feeds into the way women are judged or judge each other, as Nadira relayed, ‘I thought about how, people would think which one is more pretty and beautiful’.
Uncomfortable compositions
Although all the YWAs spoke of seeing images of naked women on a regular basis as ‘normal’, some of them showed signs of discomfort during the session. This discomfort materialised mainly through fidgeting; bodies being made uncomfortable by other bodies, similar to the experience of the life class held in 2011 (Stanhope: 2013). When asked if the images made them feel uncomfortable in any way, Lienne raised a point about the composition,
Lienne: I think the way they are positioned; I think they are telling the person, look at me and how beautiful I am, or something like that. It just looks more sexual.
Nadira also spoke about the composition and how the positioning of the women in the images suggested a patriarchal hierarchy,
Nadira: I think they were trying to say that females are submissive and like, like you can look down upon them, because most of them were like, lying down.
The composition actively sexualises the woman as there to be ‘looked at’ or to be ‘looked down upon’. This insight into the positioning of women in paintings has been argued by Nead (1992) to be a debilitating consequence of art history.
Unlearning and relearning
During the exploration, this positioning of the image began to shift for Bethany as she began to question her relationship to the image. She said
I think we are like meant to see woman in a sexual way, like even young like men and women are kinda told that women are forms that you view, and that's how you view them. I think if you saw a man, like, posing like that on a bed naked, it would be a bit more shocking.
The traditional paintings were acceptable, as they represented the way we are ‘meant’ to see women and the gaze moves fluidly and easily over the surface. However, as Bethany starts to realise, if the image was subverted and a man was positioned in a similar pose, our eyes would jar against the image; it would ‘shock’. This repetition of historical images normalises how we view images of women, it teaches a set way of being a woman in the world, and the shock only arises when this is visually disrupted. Bethany’s unpicking of the patriarchal structures in the paintings, supported an un-learning of these set structures embedded in the traditional paintings of the female nude.
Conversations exploring the history of the female nude supported a discussion of various paintings of the female nude and how they made the YWAs feel when they looked at them. The YWAs’ share their reactions to these paintings of women in the following extracts:
The learnt repetition of the female nude
The word ‘normal’ was used by several of the YWAs, acknowledging the learnt repetition of seeing images of nude women in similar positions on such a regular basis that
they had become numb to such exposure.
Bethany: I was kind of like, I didn't feel, I just felt kind of normal, coz I think I'm very used to seeing women portrayed in that way. Like in art and I guess media, but I think seeing a woman, naked or lying on a bed, it's kinda just expected, like it’s not like 'oh my goodness she's naked let me avert my eyes’, it's like ‘oh, she's naked’. I see that all the time, everywhere, it just kinda felt typical.
Lily: Yes, Ermm, I felt as if they were kind of normal, because you see, ermm, nude women quite a lot in art, and I didn't really, I didn't think it was all a bit strange or anything. I just didn't really mind.
Christie: I felt, erm, quite comfortable looking at them, because like, it's all part of life, the drawings are females and it's been going on for centuries and many people have been doing over the past years, ermm, even till this day, so it's like part of our history.
As the positioning of women’s bodies in this colonial narrative has been ‘going on for centuries’, and in consequence is seen as ‘part of our history’, the images were not considered unusual but in fact have become normalised. As Bethany highlights ‘seeing a woman naked is just kinda expected’.
Ideas of beauty
The patriarchal and colonial repetition of these images have become the ‘norm’ of what is deemed beautiful. All the YWAs spoke of the women in the traditional paintings in terms of their attractiveness,
Lily: I thought they were really beautiful.
Bethany: the paintings in the first one they are like really so stunning and the women are so beautiful, I think everyone wants to be, people often aspire to be like that because they want people to look at them and to think wow, she's beautiful.
Lienne: I guess the position looks attractive to the beholder, especially men, to emphasise their curves.
Bethany suggests that images manipulate her way of understanding what is valued. Our understandings of beauty are also imbued with the learnt structures of colonial histories, as discussed in Raced Skins, a learnt process in which women are ranked in terms of race, heterosexual desire, ability and age (Nead: 1992).The hierarchy of beauty feeds into the way women are judged or judge each other, as Nadira relayed, ‘I thought about how, people would think which one is more pretty and beautiful’.
Uncomfortable compositions
Although all the YWAs spoke of seeing images of naked women on a regular basis as ‘normal’, some of them showed signs of discomfort during the session. This discomfort materialised mainly through fidgeting; bodies being made uncomfortable by other bodies, similar to the experience of the life class held in 2011 (Stanhope: 2013). When asked if the images made them feel uncomfortable in any way, Lienne raised a point about the composition,
Lienne: I think the way they are positioned; I think they are telling the person, look at me and how beautiful I am, or something like that. It just looks more sexual.
Nadira also spoke about the composition and how the positioning of the women in the images suggested a patriarchal hierarchy,
Nadira: I think they were trying to say that females are submissive and like, like you can look down upon them, because most of them were like, lying down.
The composition actively sexualises the woman as there to be ‘looked at’ or to be ‘looked down upon’. This insight into the positioning of women in paintings has been argued by Nead (1992) to be a debilitating consequence of art history.
Unlearning and relearning
During the exploration, this positioning of the image began to shift for Bethany as she began to question her relationship to the image. She said
I think we are like meant to see woman in a sexual way, like even young like men and women are kinda told that women are forms that you view, and that's how you view them. I think if you saw a man, like, posing like that on a bed naked, it would be a bit more shocking.
The traditional paintings were acceptable, as they represented the way we are ‘meant’ to see women and the gaze moves fluidly and easily over the surface. However, as Bethany starts to realise, if the image was subverted and a man was positioned in a similar pose, our eyes would jar against the image; it would ‘shock’. This repetition of historical images normalises how we view images of women, it teaches a set way of being a woman in the world, and the shock only arises when this is visually disrupted. Bethany’s unpicking of the patriarchal structures in the paintings, supported an un-learning of these set structures embedded in the traditional paintings of the female nude.