Therapeutic Beauty.

This article focuses on the fact that female purity constituted a dominant theme for artists in the late nineteenth century. Indeed, late-nineteenth-century America, often referred to as the Gilded Age for its display of corporate wealth and cultural patronage, was also characterized by massive immigration, working-class violence, overcrowded housing for the poor, garbage-filled streets, industrial pollution, and the spread of epidemic disease. All of which played a role in remaking the nation as a specifically modern entity. For the most part, scholars have assumed that this process of modernization unfolded independently of artists' depictions of idealized women.