Cigarette Smoking Girls

Isaac Israëls's 'Cigarette Smoking Girls' (1900) is a modern social subject — the cigarette-smoking woman as an emblem of female modernity and social emancipation, the transgression of the conventional prohibition against women smoking being both social statement and a marker of the changing social codes of the Belle Époque. Israëls's engagement with modern female social life in its fashionable, emancipated aspects connected him to the broader European interest in the 'new woman' as a pictorial and social phenomenon.

Israëls renders the smoking girls with his characteristic loose, modern handling — the figures in their social setting depicted with the Impressionist-influenced brushwork and the direct observation of contemporary social life that was his most immediate quality. His handling of the specific social moment (the girls smoking in whatever social setting the composition depicted) creates both the social observation and the formal interest of the modern figure subject.