1.Berthei\Qorisot,TheWet.A%urseand Julie,1879_Washington,D.C., private collection.The Construction o fWork and Leisure inImpressionistPaintingBertheMorisot'sWet Nurse and Julie [ 1Iof 1879is an extraordinarypainting.zEven in the contextof an oeuvre in which formal daring is relativelyunexceptional,this work is outstanding. "All thatis solid melts into air"-Karl Marx's memorablephrase,made under rather different circum-stances, could have been designed for the purposeofencapsulatingMorisot's painting in anutshell.3Nothing is left of the conventions of pictorial con-struction:figureversus background, solid formversus atmosphere, detailed description versussketchy suggestion, the usual complexities of com-position or narration. All are abandoned for a com-position almost disconcertinginits three-part sim-plicity; a facture so open, so dazzlingly unfetteredas to constitute a challenge to readability; and acolorism so daring, so synoptic in its rejection oftraditional strategies of modeling as to be almostFauve before thefact.4Morisot's Wet Nurse isequally innovative in itssubject matter. For this is not the old motif of theMadonnaandChild, updated andsecularized,asFrom Linda Nochlin,Women, Art, and Power and OtherEssays(New York Harper & Row, Publishers, 1988), pp.37-56. Copyright © 1988 byLindaNochlin, Reprinted bypermission of the author andflarperCollins.13MORISOTSWETNURSELINDANOCHLINTant de clairs tableaux irises, lei, exacts, primesautiers.. . .-SttpluncMallannclit is in a work like Renoir'sAline Nursingor inmany of the mother-and-child paintings by theother prominent womantiietnberof the Impres-sionist group,Mary Cassatt. It is, surprisinglyenough, a work scene. The "mother" in the sceneisnot a real mother but a so-calledseeondemere,or wet nurse, and she is feeding the child not outof "natural" nurturing instinct but forwages, as amember of a flourishingindustry.5And the artistpainting her, whose gaze defines her, whose activebrush articulates her form, is not, as is usually thecase, a man, but a woman, the woman whose childis being nursed. Certainly, this painting embodiesone of the most unusual circumstances in the his-toryof art-perhaps a unique one: awomanpaint-ing another woman nursing her baby. Or, to putit another way, introducing what is not seen butwhat is known into what is visible, two workingwomen confront each other here, across the bodyof "their" child and the boundaries ofclass,bothwith claims to motherhood and mothering, both,one assumes, engaged in pleasurable activitywhich, at the same time, may be considered pro-duction in the literalsenseof the word.Whatmight be considered a mere use value if the paint-ing was produced by ainercamateur, the milkproduced for the nourishment of one's own child,MORISOT'SU'I:7\UAS/ithat the female rural laborer was absent fromFrench painting of the second half of the nine-teenth century.Millet often represented peasantwomen at work at domestic tasks like spinning orchurning, and Jules Breton specialized in scenes ofidealized peasant women working in the fields.But it is nevertheless significant that in the quin-tessential representation of the labor of the femalepeasant,Millet'sCleaners,women arc repre-sentedengagednot in productive labor-that is,working for profit, for the market-but rather forsheer personal survival-that is, for thenurtur-anccof themselves and their children, picking upwhat is left over after the productive labor of theharvest is finished.?Theglaneusesare thus assimi-lated to the realm of the natural-rather like ani-mals that forage to feed themselves and theiryoung-rattler than to that of the social, to therealm of productive labor. This assimilation of thepeasantwomanto the position of the natural andthe nurturant is made startlingly clear in a paint-ing like Giovanni Scgantini's TwoMothers [21,whichmakesa visual analogy between cow andwomanas instinctive nurturers oftheiryoung.Workoccupiesan ambiguous position in therepresentational systems of Impressionism, themovement to which Morisot was irrevocably con-nected; Or one might say that acknowledgment ofthe presence of work themes in Impressionism hasuntil recently been repressed in favor of discoursesstressing themovement's "engagement withthemes of urban leisure."" Meyer Schapiro, aboveall, in two important articles of the 1930s, laiddown the basic notion of impressionism as a repre-sentation of middle-class leisure, sociability, andrecreation depicted from the viewpoint of the en-lightened,sensuallyalertmiddle-classconsumer.`'One could contravene this contention by pointingto a body of Impressionist works that do, in fact,continue the tradition of representing rural laborinitialed in thepreviousgeneration by Courbetand\1111ctand popularizedIIImore sentimentalformb%-Breton and Basticn-LepagePissarro, par-ticularly, continued to develop the motif of thepeasant,particularlythe laboring or resting peas-ant woman, and that of themarketwoman in bothImpressionistand Neo-Impressionistvocabularies,233right down through the 1880s.BertheMorisotherselfturned to the theme of rural labor severaltimes: once inTheHaymaker,a beautiful prepara-tory drawing for a larger decorative composition;again, in a little painting,In theWheatField,of1875;and still another time (more ambiguously,because the rural "workers" in question, far frombeing peasants, are her daughter, Julie, and herniece Jeanne picking cherries) inThe Cherry Treeof1891-92.10Certainly, one could point to a sig-nificant body of Impressionist work representingurban or suburban labor. Degas did a whole seriesofironers;rrCaillehotte depicted floor scrapersand house painters; and Morisot herself turned atleast twice to the theme of the laundress: once inLaundresses Hanging Out theWash [3]of 1875,a lyrical canvas of commercial laundresses plyingtheir trade in the environs of the city, paintedwith a synoptic lightness that seems to belie thelaboriousness of the theme; and another time inWoman Hanging the Washing (41,of 1881, aclose-up view where the rectangularity of the lin-ens seems wittily to reiterate theshapeand textureof the canvas, the laundress to suggest the work ofthe woman artist herself. Clearly, then, the Im-pressionists by no means totally avoided the repre-sentation of work.To speak more generally, however, interpretingImpressionism as a movement constituted primar-ilyby the representation of leisure has to do asmuch with a particular characterization of labor aswith theiconographyof the