Au bal masqué (no. 17)

In Au Bal Masqué (no. 17), we see a man holding huge glasses up to his face and peering closely at a young woman in traditional regional dress. Her body turns away from his ogling gaze. She wears a revealing dress and appears to hold a flower, perhaps a symbol of her innocence. Along with his glasses, the man’s caricatured features include a large round nose, a pronounced peering posture, and a balding head with hair that sticks up like a clown. The text below the picture indicates that the man is flirting with the woman by asking her if she is from Strasbourg, a town in northeastern France. He asks, “If I am not mistaken...I have in front of me a charming Strasbourgeoise?” Responding with a witty pun, she replies, “Yes...and who does not like ‘strass...bourgeois!,’ or ‘glamour... bourgeois!’ ” With this response, she shows her disdain for the showy bourgeois. The woman coyly dodges the man’s advances, and in so doing, sheds light on the relations between the center and the provinces in nineteenth century France, and the intersections of gender and class it served to reveal. This print perpetuates the male gaze by having the man flirt with the woman at a close proximity in a public space. It also subverts that gaze by having the seemingly demure woman refuse his advances in such a blasé manner.

The setting of the print is significant because the pair stand in front of a door with a sign labeled Loge A, suggesting that it is the entrance to a private box at a French theater. Artists of the period often used the theater as a setting to satirize relations between upper-class men and women out on the town or in the public sphere. The significance of this public space relates to the codes of respectability that dictated women’s behavior outside of the home in the mid-nineteenth century. Despite these dominant bourgeois standards, women like the one we see in Au bal masqué (no. 17) could also ignore and transgress such norms. [1] As important sites for social interaction, theaters were places for French citizens to see and be seen by their peers and contemporaries. [2] This use of the theater to explore exhibitionism and voyeurism in public space is most famously evident in contemporary works by Impressionist painters such as Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Because prints were easily reproducible, they were able to depict gendered relations and also circulate them. [3] If you look closely, the newsprint showing through the underside of Au bal masqué (no. 17) is visible, revealing the mass media context in which it was originally viewed. Between 1842 and 1866 Beaumont created some 1,200 prints, including 188 in this series alone. Others from the same series also capitalize on the ambiguous gaze between men and women in the French public sphere. In Au bal masqué (no. 22), for example, two women talk at a similar theater box. The text that accompanies the print tells us that they are gossiping about an ugly man across the room. Though ugly, they suggest that he is the perfect man for a woman because of his financial wealth. In each of these prints, a selection of which are held in the University Art Gallery collection, we can only observe as these theater- goers look and are looked at in their respective scenes.

These prints represent a small slice of Edouard de Beaumont’s Au bal masqué series. The significance of the title of this series, Au bal masqué or At the Masked Ball, is noteworthy because print no. 17 depicts nothing that resembles a masked ball except for the man’s exaggerated features. Masquerades were popular imagery in France at this time, which suggests that de Beaumont might have implied that the latent qualities of the masquerade, such as anonymity, deceit, promiscuity and superficiality, equally exist in more everyday settings. Additionally, because masked balls were contexts that permitted forms of interaction and intimacy otherwise prohibited, they can be regarded as occasions where gender and sexual norms could be transgressed. [4]

De Beaumont’s satirical images of gender relations are not always as progressive as this description of the series might suggest. In 1848, after Au bal masqué, de Beaumont stopped depicting women in acceptable female roles and instead reconnected them to the role of prostitute. He would also reverse their gender roles to support an antifeminist backlash prompted by a conservative political climate. [5] Out of this same school of thought, de Beaumont authored a book titled The Sword and Womankind that attributes a range of historical calamities to the deeds of wayward women. [6] For example, depictions of women castrating men and enacting other violent acts spread from the belief that women were responsible for the failure of the 1848 revolution. While the prints from Au bal masqué may not depict these same sentiments, it satirizes diversions from gender norms while also depicting women outside of the domestic sphere, behaving contrary to traditional social expectations.

[1] Dana Goldstein, The Women of Modernity, the Gendering of Modernity: Bourgeois Respectability and the Forgotten Female Types of French Panorama, Paris: Capital of the 19th Century, http://library. brown.edu/cds/paris/Goldstein.html, Accessed April 4, 2018.
[2] In the Loge, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, www.mfa.org/collections/object/in- the-loge-31365. Accessed April 4, 2018.
[3] See Beatrice Farwell, The Cult of Images: Baudelaire and the 19th-Century Media Explosion, Santa Barbara: UCSB Art Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1977.
[4] Nóra Veszprémi, The Emptiness Behind the Mask: The Second Rococo in Painting in Austria and Hungary, The Art Bulletin 96, no.4 2014, pp.441-462.
[5] Janis Bergman-Carton, The Woman of Ideas in French Art, 1830 –1848, Yale University Press, 1995, pp.57-58.
[6] Edouard de Beaumont and A. R. Allinson, The Sword and Womankind: Being a Study of the In uence of ‘the Queen of Weapons’ upon the Moral and Social Status of Women, London: Society of British Bibliophiles, 1900.

Author: Rebecca Moser - Spring 2018

Édouard de Beaumont (1821-1888)
Au bal masqué (no. 17), c. 1840
Lithograph
72.1.36.XXIII

“If I am not mistaken…I have in front of me a charming Strasbourgeoise?”
“Yes…and who does not like 'strass...bourgeois!' 
Strasbourg is a regional town in the east of France, here used to pun with the word “strass”, meaning glamour, glitter and cheap rhinestone jewels. (This is Not Ideal, Fall 2018)