Academic paintings and traditional representations of the nude in 19th century France put woman on display for the pleasure of a spectator presumed to be male. The European artistic tradition was subject to conventions calculated to flatter the male viewer and to stimulate his fantasy of sexual domination. Nudes were depicted in allegorical form as mythological figures who flaunted an unnatural lack of pubic hair or any element that identified them as individual women and erased any potentially threatening signs of woman's desiring subjectivity.
T.J Clark’s analysis of acadmeic paintings of the nude by painters such as Alexandre Cabanel, William bouguereau, Felix-Henry Giacomotti, and Paul Baudry shows that the genre, as it is defined in the above terms, was in disarray. Although presented in allegorical form and lacking those elements which define them as sexual beings, the women in these paintings seem to collaboarte a little too eagerly with the male gaze, as if “they were actively soliciting it and desireing its sexual consequence.” (Bernhemimer, Figures of Ill Repute, 104) The critic J.A Castagnary wondered saracastically about the woman lolling on some rocks in Baudry’s The Pearl and the Wave (1863) if she might not be “a Parisian modiste.. lying in wait for a millionaire gone atray in this wild spot.” (Clark, PML, 295)
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