Roles Of Women In Art Essay

Women have often been included in paintings and art even back to the Native Americans. Women within pieces of art typically portrayed the role of women during that time or culture. As the time in which a piece was created changed, the depicted role of women also adjusted. Additionally, the role of women varied between different cultures. However, the general ideas represented by the female form in artwork were motherhood, beauty, and the obligation to care for the home. One of the ways in which the female form was used in artwork in the Americas was to represent a woman’s role as a mother. In Prudence Punderson’s The First, Second, and Last Scene of Mortality (1773), the woman in the center is the assumed mother of the child on the right. As the piece of art portrays the growth of a young girl into a woman into a deceased human, the art can be interpreted as girls are expected to grow up and become mothers. Regardless, everyone begins their lives as …show more content…
In the late 1850s, it was not extremely popular to paint women without clothes due to the conservative culture of the Puritans. In John Vanderlyn’s Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos (1809 to 1814), a woman is portrayed laying on the ground nude. It did not receive much success during the time of its creation. However, it did show the beauty that Vanderlyn and others who favored it saw in the body of a woman. The beauty of women was not only portrayed through paintings of the nude female body but also through pieces of art with women dressed in gorgeous dresses and beautiful jewels. In many family portraits, the women and young girls are pictured wearing elegant dresses. In John Singleton Copley’s The Copley Family (1776), the woman and the young girls are each wearing long dresses, headpieces, and jewels on various piece of their apparel. The elegance of their clothing, I believe, represents the elegance and beauty of