Followers of fashion

The word ‘flâneur’ — from the French ‘flâner’, to stroll — is enjoying a comeback among a new generation of artists attracted to the idea that art is more about looking than doing. It was Baudelaire who first used it to describe the modern artist with his finger on the urban pulse — a ‘botanist of the sidewalk’ was how he defined him. The sidewalk in question being in Paris and the botanist being French, it’s a fair assumption that the principal objects of his naturalist interest were not the weeds growing up through cracks in the pavement, but the millinery flowers adorning the hats of female passers-by.

Baudelaire’s definition is quoted in Room 1 of Compton Verney’s new exhibition Vive La Parisienne: Women through the Eyes of the Impressionists, which shares its autumn bill with Richard Billingham’s Zoo. With a total of 25 works — half of them prints — the most it can offer is a glimpse through the eyes of 11 male Impressionists and one female, Mary Cassatt. Enough for a spot of gender studies, one would have thought, and the discipline’s doyenne Griselda Pollock gets a namecheck in the exhibition guide. But the real fascination of this print-heavy show is what it tells us about the love affair between fine art and the fashion plate that blossomed with the rise of the popular press.

Andy Warhol was not the first artist to dress up illustration in fine-art finery: that revolution was well under way in late 19th-century Paris, and few images in this show escape its influence. Those that do — an early portrait by Degas of his sister Marguerite, a picture by Pissarro of Mme P. sewing and a painting of a seated woman by Mary Cassatt — look rather old-fashioned.