An 1870 satirical cartoon from the journal Paris-Caprice depicts an artist, palette in hand, painting directly onto his female subject’s skin. Conflating the two meanings of “painting a face,” the artist eliminates the need for a canvas. Tamar Garb finds this spoof central to understanding the complex intersection of social, psychological, and symbolic factors involved in painted portraits. In The Painted Face: Portraits of Women in France, 1814–1914, she suggests that the metaphorical relationship between applying makeup to a face and paint to canvas provides a useful key to analyzing the superficiality and artifice found in oil paintings of women. Though discussions of makeup play a larger role in the prologue, throughout her text Garb emphasizes the importance of surface effects to understanding not only pictures of women, but femininity itself. Analyzing artists ranging from Ingres to Matisse, Garb proposes that the increasing emphasis on materiality and self-referential painting techniques in later nineteenth-century portraiture paralleled a decline in the importance to the genre of both representation and identity. Portraits of female subjects were particularly conducive to this shift. Because they typically lacked individualization, flattering the subject rather than providing an unvarnished record of her appearance, images of women were malleable...