Modern Woman: Daughters and Lovers, an exhibition of drawings from the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, by renowned French artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, is showing exclusively at Queensland Art Gallery. It celebrates the changing roles of women during the Belle Époque as depicted by leading artists of the time such as Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edouard Vuillard, Camille Pissarro, Pierre Bonnard, Auguste Rodin, Berthe Morisot and Jean François Millet.

These artists increasingly abandoned idealised representations of the female figure. Instead, they looked to women from a diverse range of socioeconomic backgrounds, depicting them in their family lives, domestic activities and in the public realm, as spectators, performers and workers. Through these fascinating drawings, we see French society undergoing radical transformation.