It is also the first study to juxtapose the portraits with other images of cultivated women, some of them previously unpublished. She approaches the material with passion and conviction, and makes her points clearly and concisely.
The book provides a useful pictorial resource for scholars of early modern portraiture, and will likely appeal to a more general audience as well. Some specialized readers, however, may be troubled by certain aspects of the argument. Goodman notes that it was not a standard eighteenth-century phrase 3 , yet employs it quite elastically and applies it to Pompadour in a way that is more assumed than argued.
“Portrait of the Artist at Work”
Its publication permission would be revoked in These were dangerous books, and their pictorial presence begs further explanation. This makes the portraits seem like homogenous expressions of a stable, pre-existing identity, and precludes the possibility of exploring them as strategic constructions that negotiated, and perhaps even contradicted, the complexities of social reality. Ultimately, we are left with a tautology: Picturing Pompadour was surely not so simple, for almost everything about her was problematic. When her relationship with the king began in , his sexual conduct had already precipitated a political crisis, and her presumed power of the royal body and mind soon became a major source of both official and popular anxiety.
Even after their sexual involvement ceased around , the scope of her perceived influence inspired widespread unease.
Portrait of a Woman (Portrait de femme)
Slander was a leitmotif of her career; its principal themes were her low birth, probable illegitimacy, physical appearance, health, vast expenditures, emasculating effect on the king, and ambition to rule France herself. Three of the five images in this category were produced during the politically volatile years But it is hard to believe in her.
The challenge for future scholarship will be to move beyond the measurement of ability, towards a more nuanced understanding of how ability itself was construed. Moreover, most of the summer was given over to the organisation by the Ministry of the Interior of the first Salon libre , which took place in August.
In September, the Constituent Assembly, in an effort to bring about a reconciliation between the deputies and the monarchy, commissioned a double portrait of the King swearing allegiance on the Constitution. Symbolically, this commission was crucially important. Two painters were approached: But, the road to war and the tensions within the National Assembly regarding about whether the King should be maintained or not meant that the arts were once again side-lined.
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In August , the monarchy was overthrown once and for all; in September, David was elected to the Convention among the Montagnards. He became a central figure in the world of art, influential in matters where aesthetics met politics.
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The minutes of the meetings in September show that women attended and spoke at will We even possess a list of the artists admitted during this period because it was decided that the names of the new artists should be recorded in the minutes. In other words, admission was not based on artistic skill, but rather on the type of citizen the applicant was. At the close of , the session during which women were excluded was particularly stormy: As a result of this meeting, however, they no longer had the right to either vote or speak in this assembly which did not mean, of course, that they were no longer permitted to be artists — no one, then, questioned the fact that the Salon could be open to all, and to women in particular.
Robespierre was put to death, David imprisoned. In the end, women would only have been statutorily excluded from the community of artists for the ten months during which that community no longer defined itself along purely professional lines, but rather based on exogenous criteria whether civic, moral, or political.
In reality, no one ever considered excluding women from the actual business of painting during the Revolution. Thus, in the Salon libre during the s and the first decade of the nineteenth century, we find several of these women artists who had made a name for themselves on the place Dauphine in the s. Self-portrait remained a genre they were drawn to. It is, needless to say, difficult to work out why: Motivation probably varied from artist to artist, for the art market was going through an economic crisis that left it languishing from the middle of the s on.
Between and , out of approximately works exhibited at the Salon, there were only forty or so self-described self-portraits put on show by either men or women, i. Moreover, due to a lack of time, the Salons from have not been included in these statistics of exhibited works. We do know, however, that several well-known female self-portraits, were shown to the public during this decade, like the ones by Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot, Constance Mayer, Henriette Lorimier ou Nisa Villers, which all date from Let us also mention the very moving Atelier de Mme Vincent en , by Gabrielle Capet , which combines self-portraiture and portraits of artists from her circle of friends in a fictional scene illustrating to perfection the notion of artistic inheritance I have also taken account of allegorical or mythical representations of the act of pictorial creation such as scenes involving Dibutade or Zeuxis for example.
Of course, in the absence of the paintings, many canvases have also been set aside due to their titles not being explicit. In this perspective, representations of museums, for instance, which were frequent at the time, have not been counted, even though they often included depictions of women drawing Likewise, the painters of several portraits depicting artists in the act of drawing or painting, did not necessarily mention this fact in the title.
These paintings are thus not counted either. As for the subjects depicted: All of this confirms that there was indeed a marked public taste at the time for images of women painting or drawing. As we have already seen, this fashion is attested to by the fact that self-portraits by the new generation of women artists were regularly exhibited in the s. But, as these figures also show, male artists also managed to find a place in this visual space by devoting a number of works to genre scenes or allegorical scenes depicting a woman with a stylus or paintbrush in her hand.
Judging that she had been unjustly treated, she drew up a petition and submitted it to the National Assembly. This case is extremely interesting, firstly because it shows that the idea of a woman applying for a teaching job in a boys school was completely conceivable, so much so that the protests of the rejected candidate were deemed worthy of consideration by the deputies, who were called upon to make a discussion. Here is what Chapelain wrote in his report: It would be socially harmful if women, leaving their sphere, were to give in to the mania for science [ We have neglected them too much; it is a delight to have enlightened women around us.
They have a quick eye, their touch is exquisite; they excel in everything that involves imitation. In terms of fine detail, above all, men fail to see a multitude of things that they see straight away: Indeed, since the educational reforms begun under the Revolution and continued under the Consulate and the Empire, sciences had shared an equal place in the public teaching curricula aimed at boys.
This failure of the legislative branch to take a decision, in the end, highlights the place of women in the fine arts at the turn of the nineteenth century: As a consequence, the image of women in front of easels, or drawing, became extremely common in the early nineteenth century: As a more positivist and masculine conception of technical and scientific progress took hold, the fine arts became associated with sensitivity and attention to detail which, in the imagery of the period, were feminine traits.
It is understandable from then on, that, in an art world where, if not encouraged, their vocation was at least tolerated, and where they benefited from training and working conditions very close to those of men, women had little to gain from banding together to lay claim to a specifically female tradition of creativity. By that time, the situation had considerably changed, the arts having become virile again in the public mind, and the academic system having fallen into crisis. But that is another story….
This is a self-portrait in evening dress which was a gift to his friend Abel, and which he expressly hoped would be used as a model for engravings to be made after his death.
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There were an estimated artists of both sexes active in Paris at the end of the eighteenth century. For details and the sources for this estimate, see S. Petersbourg, The Hermitage Museum. This painting attracted comments from many critics at the time. Right afterwards, I heard again people repeatedly saying: You can decide for yourself how good the resemblances are, for the originals are here. I raised my eyes, and I indeed saw half a dozen balconies on which were young ladies, some adorned with nothing but their natural charms, others with every sort of enhancement, and I have to admit that this spectacle was at least as interesting as the one it had diverted my eyes.
My head held high, my monocle focused in their direction, I was delighting in the image that was before me, when a man […] I recognised as an artist, woke me out of my ecstasy by speaking in the following terms: What use is it? Struck by the truth of these observations, I pulled my hat down on my head, and I turned my mind from these creators whose eyes had almost dominated my judgement, and I devoted my attention thereafter only to their works.
Wille, graveur du Roi, Paris, Renouard, , t. Hubert Robert, Projet pour la Grande Galerie, c.
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She exhibited at the Salon. Traduction de Colin Keaveney. European Portrait-Painting in the 14th, 15th and 16th Centur Agrandir Original jpeg, k. Agrandir Original jpeg, 1,4M. Agrandir Original jpeg, 6,0M.