The history of breastfeeding reveals uncomfortable truths about women, work and money. An unlikely place where the history of nursing is clearly visible is in Impressionist paintings.
Although the art of Manet and his followers is best known for its sunny landscapes and scenes of Parisian leisure, many of these paintings tell complicated human stories. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas and Berthe Morisot depict breastfeeding as the perfect example of women’s invisible labor.
Wet-nursing is an age-old practice, but in 19th-century Paris, as more women went to work in Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s newly designed modern city, it was a booming industry. Rural wet nurses (ideally in their 20s, in good health, with strong teeth and thick white milk) were regularly employed to nurse the children of both urban lower- and middle-class women and were one of the most prized domestic servants in the bourgeois home.
However, following French chemist Louis Pasteur’s scientific discoveries of how bacteria spread, as well as medical publications promoting the health-giving benefits of a mother’s milk, maternal nursing began to be favored over wet nursing. Also, conservative Catholic and liberal political ideologies fused to encourage breastfeeding as central to modern womanhood.
Breastfeeding was not a common theme in Impressionism but its treatment by Degas, Renoir and Morisot gives a fascinating insight into some of the ways women who practiced it were perceived.
‘At the Races in the Countryside’ by Edgar Degas (1869)
In “At the Races in the Countryside” (1869) we see a wealthy family, the picture of modern success, in a fancy carriage. The mother and the wet nurse (identified through her outfit and exposed breast) are seated together while the sharply dressed father, and the bulldog (an image of modern domesticity) both gaze directly at the baby and breast.
Edgar Degas’ painting focuses on wet-nursing among France’s wealthy. Credit: From Wikimedia Commons
What Degas highlights here — via the convergence of the male gaze, the female body at work and the theme of urban leisure — is the pervasive presence of modern capitalism and exchange even within a painting that takes leisure as its ostensible focus.
‘Maternity’ by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1885)
The shift towards maternal nursing is seen in a series of works Renoir made in the 1880s of his future wife Aline nursing their first-born son, Pierre. Aline was a seamstress from the countryside and so seeing her breastfeed was less shocking to an uptight bourgeois audience.
In the first of this series called “Maternity,” Renoir shows Aline sitting on a fallen tree, very much looking like a peasant with a ruddy face in her straw hat and dowdy clothes. She is also sexualized through her plump, protruding breast and direct gaze.
Auguste Renoir’s “Maternity” (also known as “The Nursing Child” — Madame Renoir and her son, Pierre) sees a move away from wet-nursing. Credit: From Wikimedia Commons
Aline seems blissful, as does Pierre, but there is something off. Renoir’s association of his breastfeeding spouse with the natural world is troublesome. The depiction echoes the claim made by the feminist Simone de Beauvoir in “The Second Sex” about how under the patriarchy, through a woman’s ability to breastfeeding and become a mother, “a woman is only a female domesticated animal”. Her serene nature also suggests that breastfeeding is not a strain or “work”.
‘The Wet Nurse Angèle feeding Julie Manet’ by Berthe Morisot (1880)
It’s in Berthe Morisot’s small painting “The Wet Nurse Angèle feeding Julie Manet” (1880), that the connection between art, work and money becomes most apparent.
Painted in dazzling hues of white, pink and green, it reveals the blended figures of Morisot’s baby and the woman employed to nurse her in the family home. The situation itself is radical — a female artist, rather than a male artist, painting a woman breastfeeding her child, not out of nurturing instinct, but for money. But it is how the picture is painted that makes it so fascinating.
Berthe Morisot’s striking painting depicts another woman breastfeeding her child. Credit: From Wikimedia Commons
What shocks the viewer is not the naked breast, but the fierceness of the brushstrokes that cover the unfinished canvas, blending flesh, figure, dress and background in thick, uneven strokes that fire off in a multitude of directions. There is something hugely expressive about this painting that maybe only a mother can feel.
Morisot exhibited more than any other impressionist. Dependent on her mother and her in-laws, the Manets, selling her art was her only chance to have any kind of financial freedom. This would have been impossible without a wet nurse and a supportive husband. Thankfully, for modern art, she had both.