Royalists to Romantics: Women Artists from The Louvre, Versailles, and Other French National Collections.

Royalists to Romantics: Women Artists from The Louvre, Versailles, and Other French National Collections by Jordana Pomeroy, Laura Auricchio, Melissa Lee Hyde, Mary D. Sheriff National Museum of Women in the Arts and Scala, 2012

Quick: Name ten French female artists born in the eighteenth century. Attentive museum goers should recognize Adelaide Labille-Guiard, Anne Vallayer-Coster, and Elisabeth Vigee-LeBrun--the most famous names in their time as well as ours. True lovers of eighteenth-century art might add Marguerite Gerard or Catherine Lusurier. And an art historian with some professional expertise in the period would fill out the list with Rose Adelaide Ducreux and Marie Victoire Lemoine before giving up in despair.

But no fewer than thirty-five talented women were represented in the exhibition "Royalists to Romantics: Women Artists from The Louvre, Versailles, and Other French National Collections," on view at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in early 2012. During the period 1750 to 1848, NMWA director Susan Fisher Sterling suggests in her foreword to the exhibition catalog,

   [W]omen were so integrated into
   the fabric of the aristocratic world,
   the Revolution, Napoleon's rise,
   and the return of the monarchy
   that women artists' absence heretofore
   from scholarly discussion of
   the era throws into question
   assumptions that reach far beyond
   the particulars of individual
   careers (9).

Three essays by a triumvirate of eminent scholars of eighteenth-century art--Laura Auricchio, Melissa Hyde, and Mary Sheriff--address and redress those assumptions.

In 1783, the Academie royale de peinture et de sculpture had four female members--the maximum number permitted. If few women were accepted into the Academie's inner circle, many others had thriving artistic careers nonetheless. As exhibition curator Jordana Pomeroy assures readers in her introduction to the catalog, "even if they were a minority among artists, women formed a vibrant community within the art world, one far more prolific and more varied than popularly portrayed" (15). The example of women artists in late-eighteenth-century France teaches us that "there existed many paths to a solid reputation and financial success that did not require an academic pedigree or a pass to an officially sanctioned venue" (21).

Indeed, recent scholarship has revealed a much broader and more diverse picture. In her essay "Looking Elsewhere: Women and the Parisian Art World in the Eighteenth Century," Hyde contends that art histories focused on the French royal institutions like the Academie "offer a partial and skewed view.... These institutions were but one part of a larger aesthetic culture in which women were a real presence" (36). Though most women artists worked outside the Academie, they "were nonetheless recognized by their contemporaries and able to participate as professional artists in the rich visual culture of their own time" (40). Women also played an important unofficial role behind the scenes of these venerable institutions. "As mothers, wives, sisters, daughters, and godmothers of academicians, women were critical links in the kinship networks that often affected the day-to-day affairs of the Academie-- matters such as who studied with whom, or who sponsored whom for admission" (36). Though the contributions of influential female patrons are outside the scope of this book, they have been discussed at length elsewhere; for example, in Hyde and Jennifer Milam's Women, Art and the Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World) (2003). Both as patrons and practitioners, "women in the eighteenth-century Parisian art world were not in every way excluded 'others' but, rather, active agents," Hyde declares (36).

The French Revolution--with its insistence on egalite--should have been transformative for women artists and women in general. In 1791, the Salon was opened to all, regardless of Academie membership, allowing unprecedented access to women. But when the Revolutionary government disbanded the Academie, women artists lost a powerful professional network, and other privileges and opportunities vanished along with it.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

   Whereas the Academie royale de
   peinture et sculpture had established
   a quota of four female
   members, the Revolutionary-era
   art institutions ultimately barred
   all women on the grounds that
   professional art making was
   incompatible with virtuous republican
   femininity (23).

Auricchio notes in an essay titled "Revolutionary Paradoxes: 1789-94." Instead of liberating women, the Revolution forced them into a regressive gender and social hierarchy.

In "The Woman-Artist Question," Sheriff examines less tangible barriers to success. The philosophes held that women were "more able to sense than to create," to reflect rather than to imagine (45). The pseudo-science of sensibilite accorded women stronger sensations but weaker minds, justifying the exclusion of women from official artistic institutions. Vigee-LeBrun challenged this notion in her self-portrait of 1790, by depicting the shadow cast by her hand and arm--an allusion to the myth of Dibutades, the maiden who invented painting by tracing her lover's shadow on a wall. "In view of contemporaneous writings about woman's imagination, this Dibutades is significant," Sheriff points out (48). Vigee-LeBrun was no mere tracer; indeed, the self-portrait depicts her at her easel, sketching a portrait of Marie-Antoinette from memory. It "thwarts any suggestion that the woman artist merely copies, for projected on the canvas pictured in Vigee-LeBrun's self-portrait is a distinct shadow, which she does not trace, and her sketch of a queen she cannot see" (48).

The three essays are supplemented by page-length biographies of the thirty-five female artists, astonishing in both their detail and their sometimes heartbreaking narratives. Take, for example, sculptor Julie Charpentier. She came from a family of professional artists, grew up in the Louvre, studied with academician Augustin Pajou, and enjoyed the patronage of the powerful d'Orleans family, but still ended up eking out a living as a taxidermist in the Museum d'histoire naturelle before finally dying in poverty in a public hospital. Or Anne Rosalie Filleul, whose seemingly charmed career ended abruptly in 1794, when she was tried and executed as a counter-revolutionary. Indeed, the story of women artists in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries might be a longer and happier one if so many of them had not died prematurely. In 1801, Rose Adelaide Ducreux, daughter of portraitist Joseph Ducreux, followed her fiance to war-torn Saint-Domingue, where she contracted a fatal case of typhoid. Catherine Lusurier died at age 28, cutting short a promising career. Constance Mayer slit her own throat with a straight razor belonging to her teacher, Paul Prud'hon.

For many female artists, the path to critical and commercial success was smoothed by famous teachers, who were sometimes also their husbands or lovers. The careers of Mayer and Prud'hon, Marguerite Gerard and Jean-Honore Fragonard, and Marie Therese Vien and Joseph-Marie Vien became so closely intertwined that scholars are still trying to disentangle them. (In Mayer's case, many paintings originally exhibited under her name were later sold as the work of Prud'hon, "thereby fetching higher prices while generating considerable confusion concerning Mayer's oeuvre" [101]). Jeanne Philiberte Ledoux touted her status as Greuze's only student; Angelique Mongez, a rare female history painter, signed her work "student of David" (102). But this strategy could backfire; Vien had to put up with Diderot's snarky insinuations that her husband had been responsible for her best work.

Other women benefited from family connections in the art world. Vallayer-Coster's father was goldsmith to the king. Ducreux and Charpentier learned to draw from their fathers, both professional artists. Marie Eleonore Godefroid's entree into the art world came through her grandmother, Marie Jacobe van Merle, who worked as the restorer of the royal painting collection.

Many women artists, including Pauline Auzou and Constance Marie Charpentier, extended their careers-- and influence--by taking on female students. Just as the publicly displayed self-portrait served as a business card, announcing the sitter's profession while advertising her skills, scenes set in artists' studios helped legitimize women artists who did not enjoy official professional status. Marie-Amelie Cogniet's Studio Interior (2nd quarter 19th century) finds a child playing with an artist's lay figure. In Adrienne Marie Louise Grandpierre-Deverzy's view of the studio of her husband, history painter Abel de Pujol (1822; Fig. 1), female pupils employ gender-appropriate instructional aids like religious paintings and a clothed female model. A plaster cast of a nude male torso is playfully turned towards the wall. In a companion piece showing the studio during the hours reserved for male students, it is a nude female model who turns her back to us, preserving the artist's decorum rather than her own.

"Continuing to recover artists who have been lost to art history, and looking beyond the usual official sources, is essential to writing the much-needed histories of the art world that have remained hidden," Hyde proposes (41). Of all the artists represented in the catalog, Adele Romany seems particularly ripe for rediscovery. The natural daughter of the marquis de Romance-Mesmon, she herself had three children by three different fathers, to whom she may or may not have been married. She is best known for her theatrical portraits of actors and fellow artists, but she supplemented her commissions by speculating on assignats during the Revolution. Another "hidden" figure, the sculptor Felicie de Fauveau, was born in Florence to French emigres. When the family returned to France, the sight of sculptures defaced by Revolutionary iconoclasts inspired her to take up carving. A fervent royalist, she was imprisoned for seven months following the revolution of July 1830; her counter-revolutionary activities eventually forced her to return to Florence, where she resumed her successful artistic career. Eulalie Morin, whose limpid portrait of 21-year-old Madame Recamier (4th quarter 18th century) graces the cover of the catalog, owned a partial interest in a Caribbean coffee plantation. Little else about her background has been discovered--so far.

There are a few notable omissions: Marie-Suzanne Roslin (nee Giroust), Sophie Cheradame, the distaff side of the Saint-Aubin family. The checklist of seventy-seven works includes only two sculptors and one landscape artist, Louise Josephine Sarazin de Belmont, though the catalog tells us that "a number of women" established themselves as landscape painters in the first half of the nineteenth century (110). Every artist is represented by at least one piece; however, even the most celebrated and prolific painters merit no more than three or four, and those not necessarily their best or most representative work. In some cases, one identifiable example is all that survives; Vien, as a member of the Academie, exhibited regularly, but most of her oeuvre has been lost.

While the resulting eclecticism is an accurate representation of the wide range of media and genres in which women artists worked, it also seems a bit random and uneven. A few additional A-list works and a slightly more focused checklist would have resulted in an exponentially stronger exhibition. Some of the catalog reproductions are of poor quality, and the design of the book does them no favors by employing awkward, unacknowledged cropping, too-tiny images, and full-page images placed side by side, so they appear to be a single canvas. But all three essays are compelling reading, and the artists' biographies will be an essential reference tool for many years to come--at least until every single one of these women is rediscovered and honored with a dedicated exhibition of her own. *

Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell is an independent scholar and co-author of Paris: Life and Luxury in the Eighteenth Century (2011).

Article Details

Printer friendly Cite/link Email Feedback
Author:	Chrisman-Campbell, Kimberly
Publication:	Woman's Art Journal
Article Type:	Book review
Date:	Sep 22, 2012
Words:	1859
Previous Article:	Facing Beauty: Painted Women and Cosmetic Art.
Next Article:	Pamela Hemenway Simpson 1946-2011.
Topics:	Books Book reviews