Violet Oakley and Edith Emerson

Violet Oakley taught Edith Emerson at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, only the second female instructor in that august institution’s history. Emerson became Oakley’s assistant and subsequently, her life partner; they were together for nearly 40 years. Oakley proved to be one of the leading muralists in the US, while Emerson served as Director of the Woodmere Art Museum at a time when few women could claim such exalted positions. Here they paint each other’s portraits.

Emerson’s portrait of Oakley depicts, above her head, a painting that Oakley had done of Emerson as a male page in a banquet scene for the Senate Chambers of the Pennsylvania State Capital in Harrisburg–evidence of how complexly interwoven their lives and works became.

Berlin Ante War, Marsden Hartley, 1914

Hartley moved to Berlin in 1913 and became interested in the military pageantry and its attendant comely German soldiers. His early works romanticize Germany’s cult of masculine rectitude. But with the outbreak of World War I and the death of his beloved German officer, Karl von Freyburg, Hartley changed. Berlin Ante War depicts a pre-war idealized version of Germany in the lower panels. The upper half displays religious transfiguration. Von Freyberg ascends into heaven on a horse amidst Greek crosses. The military lance is inscribed with a cross that is also the letter H, symbolizing von Freyberg’s death, Christian religious fervor and Hartley’s own identity.

Salutat, Thomas Eakins, 1898

Paintings of boxers usually depicted a boxing match in progress, with copious sweat and blood. Here instead we see a 22-year-old bantam weight fighter named Turkey Point Billy Smith, facing away from the viewer. His slight, hairless body is bathed in light in the center of the canvas, the area historically reserved for eroticized female subjects. There is a spiral of glances surrounding the boxer which we complete as the painting manipulates us into staring at his exposed buttocks. Predating the widespread use of “homosexual” in English outside of medicine, Salutat instead queers a performatively masculine subject, boxing, causing a viewer to instead stare at a comely young man’s rear.

Reclining Nude (Lili Elbe), Gerda Wegener, 1929

Gerda Wegener (1886-1940) painted Reclining Nude (Lili Elbe) in 1929—a painting of one the first modern transgender women. While transgender people certainly existed before this point, the term “trans” as a distinct identity category did not catalyze until the beginning of the 20th century. The subject of Wegener’s portrait, Lili Elbe, was born in 1882 and began to understand herself as Lili as early as 1904. Here, she is depicted one year before she would begin a series of gender affirming surgeries in Germany.

The term transsexual was coined by Magnus Hirschfield in 1923 to demarcate what earlier identity categories conflated. The first attempts to name homosexuality defined it in terms of gender inversion—having a woman’s soul in a man’s body, or the reverse. As the taxonomy progressed, transness evolved into its own separate, specifically gendered category—evidence that gay and trans identities were in fact born together, and grew up together, shaping each other’s subjectivities and definitions.

Wegener’s portraits of Lili cast her as she understood herself to be, as fully actualized in her womanhood. She poses as an odalisque, a trope of a lounging woman from the orientalist tradition, with a cigarette emblematic of women’s liberation in the 1920s.

Lili Elbe’s narrative was the subject of David Ebershoff’s novel The Danish Girl (2000) and the subsequent Hollywood film of the same name (2015).