Can we find lesbian scenes in famous paintings before 1850?

Well, yes we can. By looking before 1850 I can exclude Gustave Courbet, Gerda Gottlieb Wegener, Toulouse-Lautrec (above), Simeon Solomon and many others where it's obvious. But, also, we can't assume any painting of two women in an intimate clutch means they're lesbians, even if the queer coding these days suggests otherwise. I've excluded Asian art and Western erotica since they have always been private and they are rarely ambiguous. :)

So, take the two paintings below. Officially, that's Gabrielle d’Estrées and One of Her Sisters (circa 1594). That's her on the right - she was the mistress of King Henry IV of France. But why should we assume the other woman is her sister (art historians have decided this but they don't know) and, even if she is, isn't there a sub-text here with the nipple tweaking and holding the ring and the holding fingers in the painting below it? What do they mean?

First off, paintings about nude bathing were already a convention - c.f. François Clouet's A Lady in her Bath (1571) and the Fontainebleu School produced dozens of paintings like these. If pinching the nipple suggests pregnancy, and the ring is Henry’s coronation ring, is that all? Maybe...

Lesbian relationships were illegal and so was painting them but, after the Renaissance, painters got around this with clever allusions and ambiguity. Why would they bother? The same reason artists have always taken risks: to engage the viewer and comment on our world. There is evidence from the time that the sexual meaning was well understood by viewers, some of whom were shocked. The theatricality is enhanced by the curtains being drawn aside, as if we are intruding.

Nowadays, the lesbian coding in these paintings is well accepted outside traditional art historians, no matter whatever d'Estrées got up to in real life.

Generally though, there were two ways for painters to get around the moral and religious codes: mythological and allegorical. The painting below is actually a woman and a man dressed as a woman in a kissing game.

This style is clearly borrowed from the popular mythological representations of Jupiter and Callisto, when Jupiter changes himself into Diana in order to seduce Callisto, two versions of which are shown below.

The other approach was to couch things in allegorical form. Below is Venetian painter Rosalba Carriera's Charity and Justice, a print based on an original pastel from the 1730's. There were various combinations like this: Justice and Peace, Justice and Prudence, etc.

More here...