Seeing otherwise: watercolor still life and the return of the gaze – Claude Hirst, Phyllis Sloane, and Idelle Weber, a feminist reconsideration

Historically, women artists were dismissed under the male gaze, restricted to “feminine” subjects and mediums, and denied critical recognition. This essay examines the evolution of the female gaze in American watercolor still life through the careers of three women artists: Claude Raguet Hirst (1855–1942), Phyllis Sloane (1921–2009), and Idelle Weber (1932–2020). Through attention to everyday objects and strategic modernist visual choices, this essay argues that Hirst, Sloane, and Weber advanced a feminist agenda, reclaiming and reinterpreting the gaze within a dismissed and undervalued medium. Their work transforms the ordinary into a site of personal expression, while also rendering women’s artistic labor visible, showing that women’s artistic contributions were never secondary but deliberately subversive. This study situates their contributions within broader feminist and art historical discourse, challenging entrenched gender biases and demonstrating how the female gaze operates not as a reversal of the male gaze but as a representation of lived experience.