Women alone: paintings of solitude, 1868-1907

The paintings, drawings and prints gathered here, made between the 1860s and 1907, show women on their own: sitting in a café, reading, sewing, ironing, looking out of a window. These pictures are rarely dramatic. Their subject is attention: where a woman's eyes go when no one in the picture is looking back at her.

Alone in public

Fernand Lungren's In the Café (1882–84) is the boldest of these scenes. Lungren travelled to Paris in 1882 and briefly attended classes at the Académie Julian before giving up formal training in favour of observing the city and its people directly. Here a fashionably dressed woman sits alone and alert.

The Art Institute of Chicago reads her presence as a sign of modern Paris's changing social life, in which café culture offered women new opportunities for leisure in public spaces. Lungren painted in a dense, hard-edged style, but his interest in modern life and in the effects of light, here both gas and electric lighting, owes a debt to French Impressionism.

Mary Cassatt's colour etching In the Omnibus (1890–91) also takes place in the city. A middle-class woman accompanies her nursemaid and child on errands through Paris, riding an omnibus, a form of public transport where different genders and classes could mix. The nanny's attention stays on the child; the woman herself seems distracted, gazing towards the world outside. The print belongs to a series Cassatt made in 1890 and 1891, each influenced by her study of Japanese woodblock prints, especially their flat planes of colour and domestic subjects.

Absorbed in a task

Berthe Morisot's sister Edma posed for Reading (1873): a woman seated on her shawl in a field, her eyes on a book, a parasol and fan left on the grass. Her white dress catches the light and shadow of the outdoors, and its delicate floral pattern echoes the wildflowers of the meadow.

The most telling detail is invisible. X-ray examination shows that Morisot changed Edma's eyes, which at first looked directly at the viewer, in a way more typical of Édouard Manet's figures. The Cleveland Museum of Art points out the difference: women in Manet's paintings often return the viewer's look, while Morisot's figures are usually absorbed in tasks or private reflection.

Morisot's watercolour Sewing near the Window (about 1885) shows Euphrasie, known as Pasie, the nanny of the artist's young daughter Julie, sewing before a window in Morisot's apartment during a contemplative moment. Morisot used the sheet to work out the composition of a later painting, into which she added Julie and cropped the scene more tightly. Watercolour was a constant interest for her from around 1870 to the end of her career, for finished works as well as studies.

Édouard Vuillard's Woman Ironing (1892) is even sparer: a woman ironing a garment while a sliver of light falls on the side of her face and on the cup in her left hand. It belongs to a series of women ironing or sewing that grew out of Vuillard's close observation of his mother and sister making corsets and dresses in their crowded Paris apartment.

Outdoors, on her own

Morisot's Woman in a Garden (1882–83) was probably begun in the summer of 1882, when she and her family rented a house in Bougival, a village on the Seine in northern France. She spent the season there with her husband, Eugène Manet, brother of the painter Édouard Manet, and their nearly four-year-old daughter Julie. The child in a straw hat in the background is probably based on Julie, while the woman in the foreground is unidentified. Morisot painted her as if she were painting a landscape, with slashing strokes of acid green and bluish ochre that render the dappled sunlight without separating figure from setting.

Edmund C. Tarbell's On Bos'n's Hill (1901) shows the artist's wife, Emeline, strolling through a luminous landscape with a parasol against the sun, a beloved pet dog at her side. Bos'n's Hill, in New Castle, New Hampshire, was a favourite leisure spot for the family, which included four children; four years later the couple bought a summer house nearby.

Night, windows and silence

Edvard Munch's The Girl by the Window (1893) turns the theme towards solitude. In the dead of night a young girl draws back a curtain to look out at the street from her darkened room. Deep shadows fill the interior, and the darkness, together with the sharply tilted floor, gives the figure a sense of precariousness and isolation. Loosely applied browns, blues and violets deepen the melancholy mood.

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the window as both a barrier between inside and outside and a membrane through which moonlight casts glowing rectangles on the floor. We cannot see her face or what she is looking at. The painting belongs to a group of nocturnal scenes Munch made in the early 1890s, when he wrote that artists should depict "living people who breathe and feel, suffer and love".

Vilhelm Hammershøi, one of Denmark's most celebrated artists, was a painter of quiet spaces, mystery and silence. Strandgade, Sunshine (c. 1906) shows his apartment at 30 Strandgade in Copenhagen: the sun shines through a window onto the floor and a door, while a woman stands in the shadows. The nearly empty room, the muted tones and the closed door beside the window create what the museum calls a haunting mood filled with psychological complexity.

Hammershøi and his wife Ida lived in that upper-floor apartment from 1898 to 1909, the most productive years of his career. He painted the same corner of the drawing room again and again, both with and without Ida, and treated the rooms almost like a stage set, moving furniture and objects for their effect rather than their use. In Interior. The Music Room, Strandgade 30 (1907) the figure is gone: without a human presence, the instruments evoke only silence.

Solitude as landscape

In Odilon Redon's drawing Melancholy (c. 1868), solitude is carried by the land itself. Redon grew up near the Pyrénées in southern France, and in a series of drawings he used the craggy surface and endless reach of that landscape to evoke solitude and isolation. The woman leans forward and lowers her eyes, as if in resignation.