Norma Broude is a professor of art history at the American University in Washington, D.C., and is a leading scholar in the field of feminist art history. Broude is the author of The Macchiaioli: Italian Painters of the Nineteenth Century (1987), Impressionism, A Feminist Reading: The Gendering of Art, Science, and Nature in the Nineteenth Century (1991), and Georges Seurat (1992).

• Preface -- Introduction -- Impressionism and Romanticism -- Thematic Continuities -- Effect and Emotion in Romantic and Impressionist Painting -- Effect and Finish: The Evolution of the Impressionist Style -- Impressionism and Science -- "Romantic" versus "Normal Science" in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries -- Science and the Arts -- The Optical as a Path to the Personal: The Writings of Duranty, Martelli, and Laforgue -- The Gendering of Impressionism -- The Gendering of Art, Science, and Nature in the Nineteenth Century -- Impressionism and Symbolism -- The Republican Defense of Science and The Regendering of Impressionism -- Impressionism and Modernism