Early Modern Women:
An Interdisciplinary Journal
2013, vol. 8
Exhibition Review
Royalists to Romantics: Women Artists from the Louvre, Versailles, and
Other French National Collections. Exhibition organized and on view at
the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., 24
February 2012–29 July 2012. Catalogue by Jordana Pomeroy, Laura
Auricchio, Melissa Lee Hyde, and Mary D. Sheriff (Washington, D.C.
and London: National Museum of Women in the Arts and Scala
Publishers Limited, 2012). 144 pp. $45.00. ISBN 978-1-8575-9743-1.
This thought-provoking exhibition of seventy-seven rarely seen works by
thirty-five French women artists, active during the period 1750–1850,
was assembled from French national museum and library collections by
the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., its
only American venue. As an organizing construct, the title “Royalists to
Romantics” mixes political and aesthetic contexts for the volatile onehundred-year period embraced by this ambitious show. The sheer number
and quality of the women’s works displayed here helped to dispel prior
assumptions about the relative scarcity of women in the art world during
this era and the presumably crippling limitations they faced.
To further counter and complicate these assumptions, the exhibition
catalogue provides brief but informative essays by three prominent scholars
who, in recent decades, have been instrumental in uncovering the work and
contextualizing the roles of women artists in this era. In “Revolutionary
Paradoxes: 1789–94,” Laura Auricchio asks “was the French Revolution
a hopeful era for women artists?” and charts the “institutional upheavals”
that affected their fortunes. During the royalist era, only members of the
Académie royale de peinture et sculpture had been allowed to exhibit at the
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biennial Salons. This stricture virtually excluded women, whose membership in the Académie was limited to four, a quota met in 1783 with the
simultaneous admission of Elisabeth Vigée-LeBrun and Adélaïde LabilleGuiard. The aftermath of the Revolution brought unprecedented access
to the Salon for many more women artists, when the National Assembly
opened Salon exhibitions to all in 1791. But whereas the Académie royale
had set up exclusionary quotas for female membership, “revolutionary-era
art institutions ultimately barred all women on the grounds that professional art making was incompatible with virtuous republican femininity”(23). And prominent artists such as Vigée-LeBrun and Labille-Guiard,
who had enjoyed the patronage of the royal family and the aristocracy, saw
their careers and reputations undermined, as many of their now politically
tainted works were confiscated and destroyed by the revolutionary government.
Melissa Hyde paints a more optimistic picture of the fortunes of
women artists in the Parisian art world of the eighteenth century. In an
essay entitled “Looking Elsewhere,” she enjoins us, indeed, to look elsewhere and beyond traditional histories based on official accounts of the
Académie and Salon, where women rarely appeared, to uncover the influential cultural roles they played in the larger art world both beyond and
within the margins of these official institutions — as patrons, engravers,
copyists, and “as critical links in the kinship networks that often affected
the day-to-day affairs of the Académie”(36). Hyde sketches for us the ways
in which women, albeit in the minority and without direct support from
royal arts institutions, could nevertheless find sources of training, patronage, and markets for their work, forging alternative paths to relatively successful and even lucrative careers as professional artists.
Mary D. Sheriff takes on “The Woman-Artist Question” as it was
examined anew in the eighteenth century through the lenses of philosophy
and medical science, which propounded new theories of sexual difference
to justify the exclusion of women from the realms of artistic creativity.
Even though sensibilité (sensibility or sensitivity to sensation) was deemed
a necessary pre-requisite for creative genius in the male, in women, a biologically determined excess of that quality was thought to create, instead,
a propensity for mental illness, depriving women of the rational reflection
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331
and control needed for true creativity and making them fit only to mindlessly copy and imitate. “The historical record, however,” Sheriff writes,
“shows that individual women did not passively accept the lot that medical
science assigned to women as a group”(49), and she presents the example
of Vigée-Lebrun as an artist who actively and self-consciously refuted
these prevailing and potentially crippling cultural assumptions in both her
writing and her art.
All three of these erudite essays take the eighteenth century as their
primary focus, with the result that the catalogue provides the reader with
no sustained analysis either of the new opportunities that women artists
enjoyed or the new challenges they faced in France during the first half
of the nineteenth century.1 This is a troubling omission, since it is from
this later period that fully half of the works in this exhibition come. The
changing professional fortunes of women artists — the new paths to training, sources of patronage, and markets for their work afforded them as
this era progressed under Napoléon and his Empire, the Restoration, and
beyond — can be inferred, nevertheless, from a reading of the informative
full-page biographies that follow the essays. Arranged alphabetically, however, they too fail to convey a coherent chronological picture of the larger
period that the exhibit set out to explore.
Accompanying each artist’s biography is a single full-page, high
quality illustration of one of that artist’s works in the exhibition. Other
illustrations of works in the show, some unfortunately cropped, are scattered throughout the catalogue as random accompaniments to the front
matter and introductory essays, making it difficult to gain visual insight
into the character or scope of any individual artist’s work. Admittedly,
twenty-one of the thirty-five artists in this exhibition are represented with
just a single work each; for the remaining fourteen, the norm is two to four
works, and in only three cases — five paintings by Haudebourt-Lescot,
eight by Marguerite Gérard, and fourteen chalk drawings by the botanical illustrator Madeleine Françoise Basseporte — are we given a broader
For a politically astute analysis of these issues, see Gen Doy, Women and Visual
Culture in 19th-Century France, 1800–1852 (London and New York: Leicester University
Press, 1998).
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visual introduction to the scope of these artists’ oeuvres. Vigée-LeBrun
and Labille-Guiard, arguably the two most famous women artists of the
pre-Revolutionary era in France, are represented sparsely, with relatively
marginal work that would give the uninformed viewer little indication of
their strength and stature. This, however, might be viewed as a strategic
choice on the part of the organizers, who have in this sense indeed “looked
elsewhere” in order to uncover, present, and highlight the less familiar.
The catalogue’s alphabetically arranged presentation of the life and
work of each artist differs radically from the actual arrangement of the
show and fails to preserve what was in fact one of the greatest strengths of
this exhibition, its thematic organization. Since in most cases no satisfactory presentation of the oeuvre of any single artist could have been achieved
with the limited numbers of works available to the organizers, they wisely
chose to arrange and install the exhibition thematically, grouping works
under such categories as “Painting History,” “Travel and Knowledge,”
“Portraits,” “Self-Portraits,” “Landscape,” and “Natural History,” thus allowing viewers to make their own connections and see changes as well as continuities across the broader chronological period represented in the show.
Nowhere was the changing climate of this period better exemplified
than in the evolving relationship of women painters to the all-important
category of history painting, which in the eighteenth century had held the
highest position in the academic hierarchy. But requiring, as it did, the close
study of the human body, deemed unsuitable for the virtuous woman, and
demanding a power of intellect of which science had decreed women to
be incapable, history painting and its rewards constituted a category from
which women were virtually barred. A case in point is Labille-Guiard.
One of the four female members of the academy, she was known primarily
as a portrait painter and enjoyed the patronage of the powerful aunts of
Louis XVI. Her greatest ambition, however, was to be elevated within the
academy to the status of “peintre d’histoire,” an ambition that was forever
crushed when her largest work, a painting in progress on a theme of royalist history, was destroyed by the revolutionary government.
How different were the experiences and opportunities open to the
women artists who succeeded her, such as Marie Guilhelmine Benoist,
Angélique Mongez, and Antoine Cécile Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot,
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333
whose history paintings are prominently displayed here. All three had been
students of Jacques-Louis David,2 and after the turn of the century they
were actively awarded public commissions for their paintings of historical
subjects. Not only were women artists now able to achieve some success in
this traditionally most masculine of genres, in some cases they also brought
to the genre their own iconoclastic female gazes. A noteworthy example is
Benoist’s large-scale portrait of Napoléon in his coronation robes (1809),
which presents an unusually human interpretation of the Emperor, standing a bit unsteadily on proportionally small feet, among grandiose props
that threaten to overpower him. While such anatomical infelicity might be
attributed to prohibitions still in place for women artists against the study
of the nude body from life, the expressive results here and their subtle
departure from the political norm are striking.
Also in the first decades of the nineteenth century, even larger numbers of women artists took up the relatively new and increasingly popular
category of historical genre painting, involving scenes, often sentimental
or intimate, drawn from the lives of historical figures or from novels.
Such paintings, also well represented in this show, eroded the boundaries between history and the imaging of everyday life, a phenomenon that
affected all artists but that gave women, in particular, expanded professional opportunities and new markets for their work.
The same might be said for the increasingly permeable categories of
contemporary history and portraiture. Women artists of later generations
witnessed the portrait genres to which they had earlier been confined by
notions of propriety become the dominant mode after the Revolution.3
Some forty percent of the works included in this show are in fact identified
as portraits and self-portraits. Notable examples of this increasingly hybrid
genre, grouped under the banner of “Travel and Knowledge,” include
On David’s mentorship of women artists, see Mary Vidal, “The ‘Other Atelier’:
Jacques-Louis David’s Female Students” in Melissa Hyde and Jennifer Milam, eds.,
Women, Art, and the Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Farnham: Ashgate,
2003), 237–62.
3
On the centrality of portraiture to post-Revolutionary visual culture, see Amy
Freund, “The Citoyenne Tallien: Women, Politics, and Portraiture during the French
Revolution,” The Art Bulletin 93, no. 3 (September 2011): 325–44.
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Figure 1. Henriette Lorimier, Portrait of François-Charles-Hugues-Laurent Pouqueville,
1830. Oil on canvas, 35⅞ × 29⅛ in. Musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de
Trianon. Image courtesy of the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Henriette Lorimier’s 1830 Portrait of François Pouqueville, a diplomat who
travelled throughout the Ottoman Empire and was Napoléon’s General
Counsel at the court of Ali Pasha (Fig. 1). The portrait is remarkable for
the intensity of the sitter’s gaze directed toward the artist, who was his
life companion, as well as for the unusually soft textures in the painting
of his jacket, the flower in his lapel, and the patterned scarf draped across
his knee. A portrait by Césarine Henriette Flore Davin of Askar-Khan,
Ambassador from Persia in 1808, an image that is at once harsh, sumptuous,
and exotic, portrays the Persian ambassador with his pearls and painted
Exhibition Review
335
fingernails in all of his bejeweled physical splendor. Disappointingly, wall
labels provided no insight into how Davin, an artist who “enjoyed modest
success as a painter of portraits and narrative paintings,” managed to obtain
so unusual a commission.
The show abounds in stereotypical eighteenth-century images of
happy mothers and their beloved children, accurately reflecting the popularity of a theme that promoted the virtues of female domesticity and
that was taken up not only generically but also in commissioned family
portraits.4 What is more noteworthy, however, are the many portraits in
which women are presented as active and creative agents outside of the
domestic realm. These include portraits of actresses and theater people,
with whom women artists might have shared an affinity, and a remarkable
group of self-portraits in which the artist’s professional identity, at work
in the studio, is foregrounded. Among these are Haudebourt-Lescot’s
exquisite self-portrait of 1825 (Fig. 2), exceptional for its luminosity and
restraint in the manner of Vermeer, and the more spirited self-portrait by
Rose Adélaïde Ducreux, c. 1799 (Fig. 3), in which the artist looks happily
out at the viewer as she embraces an oval canvas on which an unfinished
portrait of a young woman is in progress.
In portraits of women by these women artists, there is an unusually
clear and direct connection between the sitter and the artist, an intensity
of gazes exchanged and recorded between artist and subject that is in many
ways unique and that is seen here, for example, in the open gaze of the
sitter in Marie Geneviève Bouliar’s Portrait of Adélaïde Binard (ca. 1796).
The real subject of this striking painting might be said to be the frank
exchange and mutual identification between two artists who are women,
with the female sitter holding her palette and brushes supported on one
arm as she looks intently, engagingly, and without artifice at her contemporary and equal, the woman artist who is painting her.
This depth of connection and frank exchange are seen again in Eulalie
Morin’s portrait of Madame Juliette Récamier (Fig. 4), a renowned beauty
and the wealthy leader of an intellectual salon whose social circle included
The classic discussion is by Carol Duncan, “Happy Mothers and Other New
Ideas in French Art,” The Art Bulletin 55, no. 4 (December 1973): 570–83.
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Figure 2. Antoine Cécile Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot, Self-Portrait, 1825. Oil on canvas,
29⅛ × 23⅝ in. Musée du Louvre, Département des peintures, Paris. Image courtesy of
the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
many of the major literary and political figures of her period. In this painting, shown at the 1799 Salon, the subject appears clad in a filmy tunic,
as she would also be in the famous unfinished portrait of her that was
begun in the next year by Jacques-Louis David (Paris, Musée du Louvre).
But instead of David’s remote image of a beautiful socialite confined in an
austere interior setting, Morin presents us with a Juliette Récamier who is
set sympathetically into nature. She looks thoughtfully and intently at us
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337
Figure 3. Rose Adélaïde Ducreux, Portrait of the Artist, ca. 1799. Oil on canvas, 69⅜
× 50⅞ in. Musée des beaux-arts, Rouen. Image courtesy of the National Museum of
Women in the Arts.
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Figure 4. Eulalie Morin, Portrait of Madame Récamier, Last quarter of the 18th century.
Oil on canvas, 45⅜ × 34⅜ in. Musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon.
Image courtesy of the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
and at the woman artist who is painting her, and one can easily imagine a
genuine and ongoing dialogue between them.
To Marguerite Gérard is attributed a presumed portrait of Madame
Récamier and her equally well-connected friend Madame Tallien (1795–
1800). The image shows them in affectionate embrace, one reading a letter
to the other, a scene of intimacy between like-minded women, both in the
physical scale of the painting and in the relationship portrayed. Described
dismissively in the catalogue as “a touching scene of female companionship”
(81), it presents, in fact, a new homo-social model of female friendship
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339
and bonding that appears in the work of women artists in the eighteenth
century. It is the only example in this show of an important and neglected
theme, potentially central to new understandings of the political and cultural power dynamics that women negotiated in this era and about which
one would have appreciated more discussion.
As an installation, the exhibition Royalists to Romantics presented
many thought-provoking groupings and informative wall labels. But there
were missed opportunities as well, especially for a fuller exploration of the
political activism of many of these women as well as their engagement with
one another and with the intellectual and public spheres, aspects of their
identities that were only barely and tantalizingly referred to in wall labels.
Despite its limitations, however, this important exhibition was in many
ways a revelation, for which the National Museum of Women in the Arts
should be commended. Its catalogue provides valuable documentation
and an excellent starting point for further research into these far-too-little
known artists, whose works, despite recent decades of scholarly effort, still
remain unjustly hidden from history.
Norma Broude
American University, Washington, D.C.